Well, the title is a bit inflammatory. Thoughts: * I have an IRC client installed, yet never use it except in those few cases where the community I need to tal

Well, the title is a bit inflammatory. Thoughts: * I have an IRC client installed, yet never use it except in those few cases where the community I need to talk to only uses IRC. * The few times I've had companies try to make IRC the dominant in-house private communications channel, it's failed utterly despite a lot of people signing on to begin with. * IRC doesn't make file transfer easy. * IRC doesn't support voice chat natively. * IRC doesn't support integration with desktop, mobile, and email easily. * IRC doesn't keep a forever-history that is instantly available when someone connects to a channel (if it does, then my clients haven't supported such a thing). * Companies that need to send notifications to your work group (things like Rollup.js or a continuous integration server) all seem to integrate with Slack. Not so much IRC. * I finally installed Slack to chat with a couple of local tech communities, and quickly discovered that Slack is in fact awesome, in that it does all of the above. Before you tell me how this client does X or that client does Y, well, I've tried several, and none did all of the above well. Even if there is such an open source client out there, well, the Slack client does the job well and everyone already has it installed. And frankly I don't want Yet Another Chat App to install. The fewer the better. This is a domain where network effects rule.