> It wouldn't have been hard to write a Slack competitor then. It wouldn't have had streaming video, and the client would have been native, but you could have gotten 80% of the functionality in there, and watched as people still complained it was just a fancy wrapper around IRC.

In 1998, I was using the Internet Explorer COM embeddable COM object to build an IRC client where all of the text rendering was handled by the HTML renderer ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. (The reason why is the same as the reason I'd do the same thing today: because fancy text layout in a native app has always sucked and still sucks :/.)