As one of the been-there-done-that crowd, when we see these "new" tools coming out, many of us have this "here we go again" reaction. I'm not a religious person but by damn, the Christian Bible can be relevantly quoted here:

    What has been will be again,
    what has been done will be done again;
    there is nothing new under the sun.

And it gets truer year after year. So much developer time is spent re-inventing wheel after wheel. This time in Java! This time in Python! This time in Electron! This time as a SaaS! This time in the browser! This time with emojis! I fully expect to turn 60 and read about the latest cool new text chat app on the front page of the 2038 version of HN.

I'm pretty sure that email and sms represent the lowest common denominator. IRC is a fringe protocol, and while there may be "mass dissatisfaction" with those tools, they are omni-present, and central to most business.

The truth is that no closed platform will ever reach the universality that email has. The prevalence of various chat platforms looks like a race to replace sms. At the current rate, there may be no winners, and only losers.

That is not everything. Otherwise we would be still using physical mail.