It's crazy to remember as recently as like 2013 the company I was at used a jabber chat server. The recommended client was an open source, very barebones one wi

It's crazy to remember as recently as like 2013 the company I was at used a jabber chat server. The recommended client was an open source, very barebones one with no design whatsoever. There was no searching through history other than the messages that had already been downloaded to you device, no mobile app, no images. Most people just used gchat instead even though that was discouraged, but the company group rooms were on the jabber chat so everyone had to use it somewhat. Even then it felt pretty dated, but the infrastructure team that ran it thought it was good enough so we kept it. Hipchat was a thing that was clearly better, I remember talk about it and I think some people pushed to switch to it, but it seemed like a daunting task and not all that important so it never happened. Then not too long after that, Slack had come out and one day I just happened to notice that the frontend team was chatting on a new app. I'm sure there were some frustrated conversations between them and the security team, we were big enough that we had a couple person security team and had some rules about only using approved software, but I guess not big enough that there were going to be any strict repercussions for breaking those rules. And that was that, a few more teams started using it, and at some point enough teams had it that we just officially switched. Between search and multi-client use it was clearly better than our corporate chat. The design made it more enjoyable to use. But the real killer feature was the low barrier to entry, I think it snuck into a lot of organizations in exactly this way by having a generous free plan and a web client so that anyone could just start using it without asking permission.