[cwilson]

I've worked with two organizations now where Slack has been heavily used. There is absolutely no chance 75% of the orgs would have used IRC, even if mandated, the way Slack is used.

Even something as simple as having an avatar next to your name makes all the difference.

The real question should be what does Slack do that Hipchat did not? The designs are obviously much different, but other than that, was it just amazing marketing and word of mouth? Even the Slack founders seemed a bit baffled by this when asked months back.

[balls187]

Hipchat is good. Slack is just much better.

From inviting teams, to the mobile client, editing messages, emojis, youtube videos, music integration, team management, role management, bot creation, keyboard shortcuts, slack just does it better.

Hipchat's mobile client is garbage, usually requires strong connectivity to be useful, and the interface is inferior in everyway.

For example, when I get a hipchat notification on the mobile app, when I slide to unlock, it takes me to the home screen, and I have to find the chat that message came from. Via slack, it takes me directly to the message thread.

[spicyj]

If you used HipChat, you would have found that it was consistently buggy and incredibly frustrating to use… but I don't think that alone would account for the difference in growth.

[stock_toaster]

I vaguely recall hipchat originally having a pretty shitty adobe air based app. Ever since they went "native" though, the overall experience has been much better.

[mahyarm]

I'm in an org that uses hipchat. On the surface it shouldn't be bad. But it fails often in fundamental ways, such as sending push notifications on mobile and desktop, chat messages, entering a chat room on mobile, etc. Hipchat doesn't scale well.

[rue]

Flowdock was (and is) much closer to parity with Slack, and I really wanted to prefer it for various reasons… but Slack just got the UX much closer to where it needed to be.

That combined with a few key adopters are what pushed Slack over the edge to meet the need before Flowdock could.

[sytse]

When Slack was released it was the only one with unread-lines. I love this feature.

[uxp]

Multiple accounts was a huge selling factor for me, though that might not have been included out of the gate. HipChat only _just_ enabled multiple accounts two months ago.

https://blog.hipchat.com/2015/06/08/connecting-multiple-acco...