If you gave "IRC" a quarter of a billion dollars, we'd have the world's most complex ncurses UI, and a security ACL system whose complexity would rival X509. And normal people would still use Slack, because Slack was able to make simple design decisions that benefit the overwhelming majority of users but piss off Unix nerds like us.

don't be naive, IRC was the simplest solution to a problem 25~ years ago, now systems have changed and things must be thrown away.

that's just the nature of the beast, x.509 is also very old- but old things should be fixed or replaced with better alternatives, slack just fixes a usability problem.. but trades all privacy and freedom for that.

Personally it's not enough, but google has a massive market share because normal people do not consider that their data or freedom has any worth.

at least google is pro-free market in the way that you can extract data out later and migrate, I don't see slack being able to offer that reasonably. (or their incentive to allow it)

1. But isn't that sort of the point? IRC as an ecosystem has had years to get its act together. Like many corners of the tech ecosystem, perverse incentives have frozen IRC's progress. The very things that Slack, Hipchat and others have exploited are the things the old guard IRC users love. Opacity, terminal interfaces and a total lack of accountability are exactly what many IRC users find alluring.

2. Using cloud services in exchange for contributing to aggregate data seems like a pretty clear understanding of personal value.

Giving "IRC" a quarter of a billion dollars isn't a good idea. Giving it to a company making a single IRC client, on the other hand, would probably result in something like Slack, only much better.

I'm not sure how you conclude it would be better. I suspect you'd end up with something approaching Slack, only without interoperability with the rest of the IRC ecosystem.

The stuff IrcCloud, Slack and HipChat undo? That's the stuff that seems to be alluring to the steadfast IRC users. Inscrutable commands, nick and chanserv and unencrypted passwords sent via a command that could very easily be typo'd to broadcast in a channel, obscure partitioning behavior that is very much not what most businesses want, a lack of accountability or verifiability, a lack of robust logging and search...

I say these in a negative way, because that's my perspective. For many people they'd list many of these in positive ways like, "improved anonymity", "off the record by default", "network robustness", etc.

How do we even measure the value that had been donated to various irc technical efforts over the last 26 years? Millions if dollars in person-hours is probably not unfair to imagine.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't companies usually get a quarter billion dollars AFTER they have shown traction?

They got $17.5MM in the four years prior to even launching.