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I know it sounds silly but I believe the main reason for HipChat failing is mostly because the name was so uncool.

• xfour 9y ago
  Uptime wasn't the greatest at a critical moment when Slack was gaining market share as well.
  • el_duderino 9y ago
    Yeah. HipChat's stability was absolutely abysmal for quite some time. They seem to have finally gotten it under control. That or a majority of their user base went elsewhere.
• bpicolo 9y ago
  More likely it's just that HipChat isn't a great product experience. As an example, the only way to edit a message is to use a sed-style "s/foo/bar", which is absurd. Because of this, you can't edit messages other than the most recent one, and if you want to edit one instance of "foo" but not another instance of "foo" you're out of luck. That's a terrible piece of UX even if you're in the only subset of users (software devs familiar with sed-style search and replace) where it makes any sense whatsoever
  • Fishkins 9y ago
    One time I was trying to correct and "its" that should've been an "it's", but I didn't realized there was a preceding, correct "its" in the post. I ended up changing that "its" to an incorrect "it's", while also leaving the following incorrect "its". It was inconsequential, but very frustrating. As a sibling comment said, the main reason my team abandoned Hipchat for Slack was Hipchat was hopelessly buggy and unreliable at the time we tried to use it.
    • ec109685 9y ago
      Um, you should have sed’d the whole sentence! J/K: totally absurd.
• cortesoft 9y ago
  But slack is?
• sjellis 9y ago
  Barry Warsaw's law of names: "All names are stupid until you become rich and famous with it." HipChat is a terrible name for a work-related collaboration tool, but "Slack" isn't great either....