It is a legitimate improvement to see everything that happened when you were offline. At that point you're not supporting XMPP; you're supporting "XMPP with some pixie dust to save that and let it be viewed, which is in a totally different place than your live chats".

Slack is a not-great implementation of a good idea, including a use case that IRC and XMPP don't meet. Tulip is a better implementation of that good idea, plus yet another good idea.

Cost. It costs money to maintain it.

Example: We pay for looker. One day I thought to myself I'll spin up Metabase and try it out for myself against our prod database. It worked very well, fast and easy to query my data unlike Looker.

I haven't used it in about a month and today I try to access it but the app just doesn't load. Now I need to spend time to look into why this app isn't loading. Nevermind that I have zero Java experience or devops experience. I just ran a Docker file per their instructions.

It's often cheaper to pay for a service.

Any of the below or all of the below (Not my own opinions, its a collection) 1. Another maintenance burden 2. You have some other company to scold or blame who is responsible for that. 3. Running it at scale. 4. Have to devote time for building features in market vs existing solutions. 5. Their UI/UX is not polished enough 6. sales bribed the manager 7. XMPP sucks for their use case.

Convenience and UX. Entire billion-dollar companies are built on delivering a better experience, even if technically inferior.