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 re

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.