IRC should surpass the notion of just a protocol and become a real product. The UX is still not user friendly. There's no standard way of doing threads. Rolling

IRC should surpass the notion of just a protocol and become a real product. The UX is still not user friendly. There's no standard way of doing threads. Rolling out IRC in an organisation is extremely hard. Cloud-based IRC hosting providers are hardly credible and not endorsed by anyone as enterprise-ready. IRC Clients are offering drastically different level of experience, if even usable out-of-the-box. Authentication is hard (why do we have a hack like NICKSERV if that stuff should be in the protocol?). Offline message retention, history viewing, and seamless offline/online transitions are completely broken (Bouncer usually solves those with terrible UX). Messaging is not easy. There are teams out there who are working on solving those hard problems full time while having the luxury of having a centralised specification with full control over implementation. IRC won't be ever be able to achieve that without transitioning into a centralised product. There are reasons why going as centralised product is best. Twitter did the same (it was easy from the technical point of view, hard from community point of view). They managed to up their game in the user experience by doing so. I'm not sure IRC can even do that at this point, the protocol is in the wild and making additions to it/standardising them, getting clients to adopt the changes would be hard. But it would be the only way for IRC to compete with other solutions.