I had the idea for slack a few years before slack came around. They've deviated a bit but not much. My use case was to have all events/messages/etc come under

I had the idea for slack a few years before slack came around. They've deviated a bit but not much. My use case was to have all events/messages/etc come under the "same roof". To have services tell me of failures, etc in our chat rooms directly. I'd argue there are better platforms for this, and IRC still does it better depending on what you're after, but that was the idea. Slack did that for us. Until their idiotic pricing plans came into play.