If you have a product (any product) in daily use by 30 staff, then switching costs (productivity hit) likely become the dominant factor in making a decision. I would be shocked that $500/mth comes into the picture when the salary expense has gotta be north of $100,000 a month for 30 staff.

Salary and benefits are an HR cost. As Project manager I don't care about that.

IT costs are booked to the project or if you are lucky to central licensing bucket which can aggregate users and obtain a discount. Either way that comes out of my project bucket which is already besieged by too many expenses.

I think you just gave a perfect description of how bureaucratic details produce microoptimizations that, while beneficial to the individual decision-maker, are not optimal for the organization.

I'll refer you back to the "Shadow IT" that was mentioned in the article, while the company I work out has the money to spend on something like this it would never go anywhere since we are a "startup" (Stretching the definition a little) and any cost over $0 is heavily scrutinized (for better or worse). We still use jabber because "It's Free" and now that we have 70-odd employees switching to Slack/HipChat seems like a huge expense. I will readily admit that the issue here isn't as much the cost as much as the people making the decisions thinking that ChatProgramA == ChatProgramB except for ChatProgramA.cost < ChatProgramB.cost where ChatProgramA.cost == $0.

I suggest Sococo (I work there). Free. Includes chat, webcam/audio spaces, doc sharing. Best for distributed teams, especially if practicing Agile.

Thanks! I think we may have just pushed through at least a trial run of HipChat but I'll pass it along and check it out myself.