I absolutely don't understand why chat is such a lucrative market. All the products are nearly identical. All the most useful features of Slack were available in IRC.
There are some features that aren't available on basic IRC, such as search, history, message emoji responses, message reminders, threading, rich integrations (eg. actionable notifications, polls, etc.) and so on.
Aside from Rich Integration (which is arguably also there if you include bots/scripting), most IRC clients have search, history, emoji, and reminders. What's missing I think is a pretty UI and lots of marketing.
> > most IRC clients have search, history, emoji, and reminders.
> Keyword: most. So: not all of them. So, there will be a mismatch and a mish-mash between features.
You can't judge a protocol by the subset of UI features supported by all of its clients. That's unfair to all open protocols.
If you want to talk about UI, you should evaluate each client independently.
> At this point someone on HN suggests IRCCloud... which is exactly the same as Slack (proprietary chat-as-a-service).
Except IRCCloud still uses the open protocol, so it's easier for users to switch to a different client. (Which, hopefully, is also an insentive for IRCCloud to not fuck up things too much in the future.)
> Usability for non tech people. Not everyone in chat has technical prowess, I know IRC seems simple but its too intimidating for some.
I communicated via IRC with a lot of non-technical people in the '90s and 2000s. Most people just used mIRC and connected to the default IRC server and went from there.
It's not the end user features. It's the admin features. You can very easily read everyone's messages, see stats on who's talking to whom the most, control who has access to what channels. The customer is the business ownership, and the product is control.
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