[mrkurt]

I think they did innovate, just not in ways that we-who-post-on Hacker News benefit from.

1. Shared channels are amazing

2. The "Enterprise Grid" was the first viable enterprise chat product. Slack made chat ubiquitous at places like IBM.

It's easy to blow off #2, but I think it's big. It was big enough to threaten MS Office.

[realityking]

I don’t have experience with Enterprise Grid but shared channels are absolutely amazing. We have shared channels with vendors, partners and customers and across all functions I haven’t heard a bad word about them (except that only IT can set them up but that might be a permission thing on our side)

[lock-free]

Shared channels are a godsend for startups trying to figure out their support story. Forums have been long known to suck, shared channels are much more responsive.

There are obvious downsides but the benefits outweigh them. I really don't want to go back to forums and email for customers.

[thrower123]

Made chat ubiquitous at IBM?

Maybe I'm a greybeard, but IBM made their own chat product that was ubique-itous* enough that Sametime became a verb there...

* Ubique is the company Lotus bought before IBM bought Lotus, before IBM sold the scraps to HCL.

[jasonjayr]

Sametime seemed to have an AOLIM connection too; or was that imagined?