News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:AIM will shut down after 20 years by Macha on Friday October 06, 2017 @12:13PM (#15417926)
It was less a intentional choice (early on at least) and more motivated by how painful using aim group chats for software development was. Slack wasn't even centrally managed for the early days of use.

(Although AIM itself started as kind of a unwanted skunkworks project, when there was an off the shelf solution available, people weren't that driven to build their own)

Re:AIM will shut down after 20 years by bsimpson on Friday October 06, 2017 @01:14PM (#15418425)
That was the brilliant part of their go-to market strategy. Rather than negotiating with enterprise executives, they let each team start its own microinstance and try it independently. It's much easier to get a 20 person team to try it than a 10Ks of people organization; but word-of-mouth and a quality product can get enough 20 person teams in a 10Ks organization to switch that eventually the whole enterprise signs up.