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The only thing Slack has changed is the name of the chat application I open. In the 90's it was ICQ, Yahoo Messenger and AIM. In the early 2000's it was Meebo (

The only thing Slack has changed is the name of the chat application I open. In the 90's it was ICQ, Yahoo Messenger and AIM. In the early 2000's it was Meebo (remember them?). Just a few years ago, we had Skype. See where I'm going with this? I'm sorry but I find nothing revolutionary about Slack. It has a good UI -- and it should, for being a real company and not some side project. But chat clients are like TV shows, they don't seem to last. I wouldn't be placing any bets in 2-5 years we will have all moved onto something else and be heralding it as the next replacement for e-mail or whatever. It's just way too easy to move on to a replacement that's the new new.

moises_silva 11y ago
I somewhat agree with you, but, a closer comparison would be that it is a 'better' corporate IRC. The comparison with ICQ, Yahoo Messenger and Skype does not really fit given that, at least for me, the biggest advantage is the tons of integrations with automated development tools etc. That wasn't really there for Skype, ICQ, Yahoo messenger, etc. It was possible with IRC, but a pain to maintain on your own and out of grasp for many other teams. Slack and HipChat make it a breeze. At our company we used to build our own integrations with IRC (using existing OSS bots, redmine plugins, etc) but ultimately it was a distraction. Moving to HipChat or Slack was liberating.