Comment by itomato

Can we go back to IRC now? Slack took what we were already doing with IRC, replaced the duct tape and firewalks, packaged up the key functionality (channels, file sharing, access) with a purple UI and mobile app and went to market.

The days of a single company maintaining a grip on something like workplace chat (and the inherent data) are numbered now. We're not building a C compiler.

Time will come when their subscription fee competes directly with another spend that can generate bespoke but commonplace business tools like chat with no data egress (or better yet, a demonstration that what you now keep and can act on what you previously paid Salesforce to steal.) Soon.