[ne0phyte]

The question should be "why not use a self hosted irc client instead". At least developers will use IRC anyway to get and stay in touch with open source projects and the countless communities that have their own irc server/channel. Why not use one protocol that's widely used?

[munin]

because they're not user friendly, and my company wants to stay in touch with more than the developers. with slack, we can have all the admin and sales staff in the same virtual space as developers and operations - how easy is it to do that with IRC?