When Apple dropped iChat it hurt too. I agree with you that Google was the mail in the coffin but the fact that there was no way for me to go from my .Mac iChat

When Apple dropped iChat it hurt too. I agree with you that Google was the mail in the coffin but the fact that there was no way for me to go from my .Mac iChat account to iMessage seamlessly (I could use the same ID but had to add everyone as contacts again). Slack was definitely a major blow. I used Campfire at work but we still had to use other services, usually gChat, to message privately. When we migrated to Slack in 2014 or whatever, we now had a service that allowed private messaging AND had mobile apps too — something that the old era of the Adium/Pidgin/Trillian’s never quite executed on (I know there were mobile AIM and gChat clients back in the day; I had AIM on my SideKick in high school and a number of decentish apps on iOS even, but those protocols just weren’t ever designed or well-adapted/executed to push messaging a la BBM or iMessage or SMS the way it needed to be — largely thanks to the wireless carriers who wanted to keep a hold of that pure profit SMS for as long as possible.) We had mobile-first/mobile-only services like WhatsApp (which immediately took off outside the US) and the GroupMe’s had some success too, but those services were slow to support (if they ever did) XMPP or other bridges to get them working on desktop), so Slack was a nice unifier. I loved Adium for so long. I even had a Slack bridge I think in it at some point. But I had to finally let it go and remove it from my dock. I pay for Beeper today, but I don’t use it as much as I would like. But it remains one of the better ways for me to recreate the world I had 10 and 15 years ago.