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Inline animated gif support.

Mobile clients, persistent chat history when switching clients/devices, search, @mentions notify you when you're away from your desk, and easy integrations with lots of services.

P.S. I mainly use IRC everyday :)

Which is IRC + ZNC + Andchat + bots...

This echoes the "couldn't you just replicate Dropbox with x + y + z ..." mindset of the past.

Why the past?

I tried to use Dropbox but it just didn't have what I wanted it to have. So, I find it to be not only replaceable, but awfully inferior to the x+y+z-style solutions.

Which takes time to set up, whereas it's already done for you in Slack.

Of course it does. But you get to keep your data for yourself.

"persistent" up to 10,000 messages per team.

Forever if you pay for it.

i.e. they have a revenue stream.

Revenue