Back when Slack came out, my company was using HipChat. It was okay, but clearly outdated and not great -- barely a step up from AOL Messenger. I was invited in

Back when Slack came out, my company was using HipChat. It was okay, but clearly outdated and not great -- barely a step up from AOL Messenger. I was invited into a Slack by some former colleagues, and it was a breath of fresh air. Someone finally upgraded the chat UI to something modern and un-clunky. It didn't hurt that it had a web UI, that it was free, and that it had configurable integrations that could work right inside the channel. Another thing that I think helped it take off was the simplicity with which it handled embedded media. Post a YouTube video or a tweet or a GIF, and the thing came alive on your screen, embedded right in the channel. You shouldn't underestimate the power of GIF sharing. There was nothing groundbreaking about Slack, and there still isn't. There are a lot of naysayers on HN scoffing at Slack for basically being a worse form of IRC, which is silly and wrong, but also right in that there is nothing groundbreaking about the tech. But products don't need to be groundbreaking to win. They just need to be better than the rest, and perhaps generate the necessary "reality distortion field" that convinces people that it's the next natural evolutionary step. Once you convince people of that, they don't go back to HipChat.