As always, the problem is not technical, it's packaging. Technically IRC can do all that Hipchat does, but Hipchat provides a simple bundle that any team can su

As always, the problem is not technical, it's packaging. Technically IRC can do all that Hipchat does, but Hipchat provides a simple bundle that any team can subscribe to/buy and use for all its use cases. To replicate the same thing with IRC, you'd need bouncers for everyone with full text search capability, a shared history of everything that happened on the server(s) of the network, support for filesharing for all clients, not just the desktop ones, you'd need some serious management of presence and profile information... Never forget the "Show HN: Dropbox" and its immediate technical rebuttal [0], see where it is now. Oh and Hipchat seems to do screen sharing, which AFAIK is not possible with IRC. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224