Also, I think Slack's threads are useful. You can have channels where you just post a single message for your question/issue and then have people reply in a thread, so that messages are naturally grouped together by topic instead of being a firehose of interleaved messages. Combined with good search, this makes Slack more of a valuable knowledge store than just an ephemeral chat tool.
I don't want to name the exact place this happened but it was certainly a unique culture that I now miss. It was neither British or American.
It was the only place I've worked where I had easy and direct access to the founders, the C level, and the VPs, as a lowly senior engineer. And not because I brown-nosed my way up; we'd connect outside of work because we liked the same things.
A total tangent, but it's just to say that we never needed Slack in the first place. I doubt many places do.
Ok, so Slack solved #2 I feel and formerly solved #3 (but has regressed significantly in recent months). Not sure gaining #2 was worth the new negatives we got.
This was 4 or 5 years ago. Now in my current company we also use Slack. It’s good, but not great either. Mostly because the UI is super slow when running in my desktop browser (Cliqz, Firefox-based). But it’s still better than Teams in my experience (I did not try the other alternatives).
One other advantage of HipChat was that it‘s native Android client would run without requiring Play Services; Slack purposefully won't run without it.
Actually triggers a good, 8-9 year old memory. Two places I worked at used to communicate through HipChat. It was simple, native, and did the job until Atlassian fucked it up with a massive rewrite. But even then it was still decent.
In both cases there was a massive bike shedding moment where the company engaged in a chat-war, with one half being solely devoted to Slack, and the rest of us holding back and saying why we need to switch. In both cases the Slack advocates went rogue and since they were also the loudest voices, people switched over just to get back into the conversation.
I have no idea what spell was cast on those people by Slack but, god damnit, it worked. It's just IRC in a walled garden and costing 10x as much, with shitty features you can't opt out of (like the new editor and threads, which birthed a whole cadre of slack micro-managers).