[Sir_Substance]

So the problem slack has is that chat is so foundational to the web that it's one of those things that doesn't really make sense to farm it out to third parties.

It's not hard or expensive to run yourself, and it's not difficult to securely expose on the web. That's why Lync has such a head start and why Atlassian's on premises option is gaining traction. Ultimately I suspect Mattermost is going to end up the main winner here. Slack, Teams and Hipchat will all have their userbases, but they'll have been in a three-way bar fight to get them, which is expensive.

Meanwhile, all those 12 person offices that farm their IT out to third party support companies? They're gonna start getting given Mattermost servers, because that's easy for the IT shops to license and install, yet also still under their direct control, which is important because IT support companies don't have a tonne of bandwidth to educate all 100 client companies if slack suddenly changes something.

[empath75]

I'm going to tell you how hard it is to get chat right. I work at the company that more or less popularized internet chat. We use slack internally pretty much exclusively, and have for years.

[inopinatus]

Goodness me. I had no idea that Mirabilis still existed. What is is doing these days?