...and cue the thread about how IRC is a better medium and SAAS has ruined communication.
But how to you get that $1b valuation by making yet another client based on open standards? You have to corner the market, and 90% of HN readership want to create or work for a new unicorn, not just improve technology for the sake of it.
Feel free to make a better Slack, that's more usable, more reliable, with more integrations, and run it on IRC. The implementation details mean little to users. Thinking Slack won because it was a closed standard and not that it's better than IRC for the majority of its users is quite the reach.
Your colleague from marketing:
- ... how do I get on it?
- How do I upload files to a channel?
- How do I search for something I wrote a month ago?
But I've also kind of come to hate live chat for internal communication entirely...but email isn't a great alternative either. I'm beginning to think there are just irreducible complexities to human communication that make every platform non-ideal, and the best thing to do is to just set and manage expectations properly as a team and as individuals.
Is there a fundamental issue with IRC that precludes that? Did no one just bother? Is it the specific mentality among its core users that "absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature" that lead to its demise?
You can't make as much money with open protocols.
Worst of all, it's very hard to pitch such a business to people who would fund you, so your business is outcompeted very early on.
What users want and what entrepreneurs and investors want are two, largely uncorrelated, things.
FWIW, I like irssi much better than the slack front end, but as font ends go, slack's is not terrible.