You could switch, sure. But would you ? You would be losing :

- Message history

- Files that have been shared

- Integrations / bots / ...

- Plus you would need to setup everyone again, create channels, ...

Slack goal is to be cheap enough that it does not represent a major cost for the company and integrated enough that moving would be a pain.

Would you, though? My company was a very early user of Slack, and imported our history from Skype group chat, IRC and HipChat over various periods in history. You can get the data out of Slack easily enough, so I don’t see that as a major aspect of lock-in if there is a competitive product.

The integration story is more interesting, but to _be_ a competitive product many of these must already exist.

The job of competing with Slack is harder than it once was (just look at MS Teams) but not impossible (just look at Slack...) - there’s lots of room for improvement.

My company switched from Slack to Mattermost, and then back to Slack. We either did all these things, twice, or lived without them. Switching is not something you'd do on a whim, but it's not really difficult either.

Why back?

The IT department moves in mysterious ways, its wonders to perform.

I think we moved from Slack to Mattermost because our infosec people weren't happy about Slack's handling of our data; there's a line in an email about "discussions with Slack over the past year regarding their data security and AI initiatives". But then Slack sorted that out to infosec's satisfaction, so we moved back, because running your own Mattermost installation is more of a hassle than paying Slack to do the equivalent.

As someone contemplating the move from Slack, I'm also very interested in this response

For the same reasons (good and bad) companies periodically switch other software platforms despite switching costs. History is exportable, and I suspect that for every company that's built clever and essential integrations and comprehensive channel structures there's another one where it's an under-used message board...

I don't think you can post syntax highlighted code snippets, or do automations with ICQ.

This is something they (ICQ team) are working on right now (actually they are launching ICQ-based Slack-alike collaboration solution, Myteam)

Well, probably rpa could help here.. If it makes sense is another story :)