So I had a few minutes to think about my response and am going to respond to my own question... With a potential solution. Much of what I am reading is that it

So I had a few minutes to think about my response and am going to respond to my own question... With a potential solution. Much of what I am reading is that it has better thread handling - I will assume that it does. I have also read the part where it is better for new team members - I get that, a new member can pop in and see the trail (how often that would actually happen? - unknown). I also read the sync vs async argument - sure, I like async but at times I need sync, like hard sync with red lights and bells (sms and whatsapp + phone calls and knocking on doors at night). I think at the core there is a kernel of greatness that can be built upon: Everything is a 'topic' and has potential triggers to external systems. I think this could be a system that has everything in it eventually. If a topic is a lazy topic then it could be tagged as such, for example a message about next weeks dev lunch, but if the site is down then tag it with a critical tag and the alarms could go off. I see the real power here is that it can be connected to external things much better than email can without significant rfc822 parsing. There is opportunity here to supplant your current email stream. The other coolness I can see is the potential for archiving everything - I think in certain circumstances Hangouts is too ephemeral. Daily standups should be recorded for remote teams or brainstorming sessions for SR&ED (Canadian tax thing). Even whiteboards and phone calls should be archived against a topic. Connect the system to a SIP service and all calls about a topic could be logged. Perhaps WebRTC would be the cool kids way of doing things. I would use a service that recorded everything (that I wanted to be recorded) and had ways of moving from async to hard sync fluidly.