[jypepin]

because businesses don't have only technical people, and you don't want to have multiple chat systems, which will eventually bring worst communication between different groups of people. If technical people are on IRC and all the other people are on hipchat, how do you make the 2 groups communicate?

[twblalock]

Plus, the fact that someone is technical does not always mean they want to fiddle with getting chat systems working. None of the engineers in my department would be willing to mess with IRC when Hipchat and Slack provide turnkey solutions that just work, the first time you open them, and require no configuration or special treatment.

[ianremsen]

I would imagine most non-technical people could scrape by with a certain client, even a web one. As someone who's on Freenode, Lord knows they do.