They haven’t fucked up hosted chat yet, which is the benchmark.

There is no chat/IM client on the market today that is superior to the pinnacle, which was circa-2000 AOL Instant Messenger. Every platform gets worse every year, except slack.

> They haven’t fucked up hosted chat yet, which is the benchmark.

well put - and - even more so: hosted business chat. all they have to do is keep on keeping on.

ICQ was quite impressive in 1997.

ICQ offered offline delivery, which was missing from many chat apps for a long time, too.

Wouldn't the Slack bot integration provide a better moat. If they can get orgs using a lot of bots for CI reporting, etc switching gets more difficult at least. Not sure how many teams get that tightly integrated with bots though.

Notifications are easy, do many companies really use more advanced bots?

I don't really know I've been at the same company for a while and we've only used Skype for Business and before that Sametime for our chat infrastructure. I've seen a couple articles written about making them but not sure how many people actually use similar bots with the ability to kick things off or change things.

Notifications are easy if the integrations exist.

Building the integrations is easy, if all the integration is is a notification. I've got half a dozen custom slack integrations that i've written for my team, it's no more than a day of work sunk in so far, including the infrastructure in our product to figure out who, what and when to notify.

If we need to switch to a different messaging platform, sending that same notification at a different api should be pretty trivial. And if it isn't, I don't know why we'd be switching.

Building an integration is having someone:

- deal with the target platform's API

- deal with APIs of the many platforms that are being integrated

- maintenance and SLAs

I honestly doubt you can create half a dozen good integrations that require more than just notifications in a channel (for example, PagerDuty notifications and the like).