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I don't think the rise of products like slack have anything to do with what people want vs what investors want.

• majewsky 5y ago
  Not in my experience. At my workplace, dev teams started setting up their own Slack workspaces by themselves, sometimes funded by private credit cards. After more than a year, the company gave in and purchased an enterprise subscription to get integration with our internal SSO and so forth.
• ftio 5y ago
  Investors want it because people want it. I'm a longtime IRC user. I have native IRC apps on every device I own. Despite this, Slack/Discord are better in terms of user experience in almost every way, and users are clearly voting for a better experience. Listing just a few key features: - Persistence: we don't use the internet the way we used to when IRC was created. It sucks that if you lose connectivity to an IRC server for a few minutes, you are presented with a fragmented view of the conversation. Slack/Discord maintain history reliably and natively. - Search: there are pros and cons to this, but it's nice to have a community memory that's searchable and referenceable. - Rich media: images and video are critical parts of internet culture. I could go on. It isn't even close.