While IRC is certainly in use at companies and by the public, it's in a pretty steep decline, especially in the last decade and a half. The only people who avid

While IRC is certainly in use at companies and by the public, it's in a pretty steep decline, especially in the last decade and a half. The only people who avidly use it in their free time anymore tend to be tinkerers and tech types. (As a side effect of this, the only large network that hasn't been shrinking significantly is Freenode.) From the public point of view, IRC is something for CSI-type movies to name drop when they want to evoke hacker culture, which is not by itself a bad thing, but it's a strong indicator of a perception problem. As someone who has spent a non-trivial amount of time in IRC development and as an operator on small and medium sized networks, I've noticed that IRC (especially when services are involved) is pretty counter-intuitive for many users, even otherwise brilliant ones. Modes are obtuse and vary wildly from server to server, the idea of a separate nickname and channel registrations seems unnecessarily complex, channels just disappear when everybody leaves them, and so on. On top of this, the IRC architecture is needlessly limited for the most common IRC network use cases these days. In the past where networks were a federation of autonomous servers, it made sense, but these days a network's servers are partly or entirely controlled by a single entity, and things like netsplits are an unnecessary interruption in user service. There is a working group to define the next generation of the IRC standard, but the additions tend to be patches for small nigglings in the protocol (such as needing to consistently poll for user away statuses and account names) than aggressive overhauls to the whole architecture, which is okay; there's only so much you can do with an effort like that while still seeing progress, and these are things IRC has needed for a long time anyway. In my opinion what is needed if IRC is to regain its popularity is an innovative new server implementation that challenges the very workings of IRC from the ground up, maintaining only enough of the protocol to interact with existing clients. If users are to feel comfortable with IRC, they need a server software suite that conforms to their expectations of how a chat service should behave, and no solution currently provides that. The problem is, there is an enormous engineering cost associated with this, and the IRC development community is having a hard enough time as it is finding people who are willing to do more than just basic maintenance tasks.