The top comment on Dropbox's original announcement went like
> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software ... is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
He's probably right, it's not reasonable and dropbox is a shitty product. But the market has determined it's valuable, despite what we techies think.
I've never used HipChat but I always hated Slack. My boss would always delete my comments without telling me when he didn't like what I said.
But this comment is very similar to the infamous rsync comment on the Dropbox original Show HN post. Most people don't know IRC, are put off by it's raw (or lack of) design, etc. It's much easier to sell something like slack/discord than IRC.
I remember having so many engineers fighting against HipChat being too slow, and saying we should just use IRC. Yes, in a way it's true, it does everything we'd need, it's fast, can be self hosted etc... but Nancy from HR or Paul from finance would NOT want to figure out how it works.