[achievingApathy]

I am routinely amazed that people find Slack innovative. It's basically a pretty front-end to IRC. And your chat logs were always searchable.. open in a text editor and Ctrl-F. Even the integrations aren't novel, IRC bots have existed for decades.

IRC also has the added benefit of being scalable and free. And everyone has their favorite client already that is more customizable than any Slack client. And you can own your own data/conversations, as an organization. I have never really been comfortable with the notion that Slack can poke around in any channel's history regardless of how secret those conversations are thought to be.

[ryandrake]

A great deal of tech, especially today, is just re-writing things from the past, closing up the protocols, and then putting marketing behind them to make it look like you're inventing something. Slack (IRC) is one. Look at the dozens of instant messaging clients that are just clones of ICQ from the 90's. Social networking sites are pretty much rehashed (albeit giant) BBS systems.