Could also be a reporter misquoting. Reporter says, “how do you respond to someone who says this creates fewer choices for people?” CEO: “There’s fewer choices for people, but they are better than choices.” Boom, first half is the money quote.
I agree completely, that's a terrible statement for an executive to make and PR should have stopped that. But on the other hand, I can almost see the logic in it. I'm making a huge leap here, but I remember back in the early 2000s, I had some friends who used AIM. I had some friends who used MSN. I had some friends who used ICQ. I had some friends who used Yahoo. These different chat services were really all exactly the same, the only difference is you can't chat between AIM and MSN. I don't care which chat service "wins", I just want all my friends using one so I don't have to sign into fifteen different services just to communicate.
In that situation, Adium or Trillian or various third party clients were basically required if you had any sizable group of friends. Just standardizing on one chat platform would have been better than everyone making their own, since they weren't really competing to make anything better. They just existed, and all did exactly the same thing and were incompatible with each other.
The question is, does Slack differ from Hipchat differ from Teams in any meaningful way, and does Hipchat disappearing actually make a difference when Slack exists? I honestly don't know the answer.
> I just want all my friends using one so I don't have to sign into fifteen different services just to communicate.
If only the different services would be able to talk with each other, you wouldn’t have to get your friends to all switch to one of them. But, here we are, a decade or two later, and interoperability is still nonexistent.
And it's very good for the company, as they don't need to do as much competition with HipChat so they can slow down innovation and raise prices. Win, win.
It's true that individually most people are happier without a choice, but when you take them away you end up cutting out whole chunks of people. What if the thing that went away was accessible to people with certain types of disabilities and the new thing isn't? What if the old one wasn't a public company but the new thing is and now they have to comply with U.S. export laws and you were perfectly okay using it in Iran before but now can't? etc. There are a number of cases where most people won't want a choice, but by giving them what they want and removing one you hurt a lot of other people.