It seems very unfair to the thousands of people who have donated time, money, and services to IRC over its life span to dismiss it as not having gotten value.

It is not an obscure fact that investing shitton of money in marketing will yield better adoption than investing the same money in the product. People "who have donated time, money, and services to IRC over its life span" generally focused on the technical side.

You misunderstood. I am saying IRC would be as easy as slack if the slack team spent the time working on IRC. Their investors would never let them even if they wanted to.

This is like saying Apple products are popular because Apple has a great marketing team, as opposed to because said products are genuinely easier to use (they "just work") than their alternatives.

Sadly, a lot of people (generally die-hard nerd types) genuinely believe that marketing was the sole reason for the iPhone's meteoric rise in 2007. They don't place any importance on user experience and therefore can't tell the difference between the iPhone and the early-gen smartphone predecessors (Palm/Nokia/etc).

These are the same people that are now confused as to why Slack has risen in popularity despite the existence of IRC, which (in their eyes) is technically superior.

To be fair, (as a Slack user) I'm not sure off-hand what Slack has that couldn't have been done on top of IRC. Almost everything could have been done with an IRC Server + Backend Services + Fancy Client model.

Problem: "Backend services" - how many of the Slack integrations don't have public APIs and Slack was only able to do it by being a single company? Good luck convincing people to set up the API keys for all of those services.

Why can't Slack run irc servers on their own equipment? The "integrations" would just be IRC bots running on private Slack servers, no?

> (they "just work")

Please don't say that Apple products "just work". We've got an office full of them.

and I need to "put a USB keybord, take it out again" when suddenly my Mac keyboard and trackpad stop responding xD

I'd rather have "easier to debug when it doesn't work" than "just works, most of the times"

Yes, it's pretty much self-evident truth. "Genuinely easier to use", even if it was clear-cut thing, doesn't explain the levels of popularity Apple products have. Lifestyle branding does.

It reminds me of Raspberry Pi. There are lots of more powerful boards that you can buy cheaper, but people still mostly buy RPi because it is the brand.

Buying 'the brand' can also lead to much more documentation which can make the 10% change in price worth while.

Apple products got good because of large amount of investment, not because they were popular. If IRC tech got the investment slack has now, it would only get better.

It worked for Nike and De Beers.

The entire sports drink industry.

The supplement industry.

Can't tell if this is sarcasm or not...

But that is why Apple is so popular. They are a marketing monster! They sell a "lifestyle" and they do it extremely well. They tell you to "Think Different" (as long as it means buying an apple product). They tell you one button is easy and the best. They tell people what to think and (some) people think that.

Yet they spend less on marketing then most major tech companies. One could just argue they spend their marketing budget well, but you have to wonder.

They spend just maintenance level. Tech press and media does the marketing for them.

Less as a percentage of gross income, or less in total dollars?

Both. Apple is infamous for its anemic marketing budgets; e.g.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/04/apples-advertising-budget...