> There are a lot of comments here about how IRC lacks features of HipChat/Slack/whatever.
I really don't understand this. What features does IRC lack that Hipchat has? AFAIK, the advantage of Hipchat is the branding, the packaging, and the support.
The one thing I see ("image previews") is a feature of the client, not IRC itself. And many clients used to offer that, way back - the reason they turned it off was because it was a great vector to (e.g.) goatse someone. In any GUI-based IRC client, this is dead simple.
Most of what Hipchat seems to provide is branding and support, and I get that that's very valuable, but I don't see why that needs to be viewed as an either/or situation.
As always, the problem is not technical, it's packaging. Technically IRC can do all that Hipchat does, but Hipchat provides a simple bundle that any team can subscribe to/buy and use for all its use cases. To replicate the same thing with IRC, you'd need bouncers for everyone with full text search capability, a shared history of everything that happened on the server(s) of the network, support for filesharing for all clients, not just the desktop ones, you'd need some serious management of presence and profile information...
Never forget the "Show HN: Dropbox" and its immediate technical rebuttal [0], see where it is now.
Oh and Hipchat seems to do screen sharing, which AFAIK is not possible with IRC.
I really don't understand this. What features does IRC lack that Hipchat has? AFAIK, the advantage of Hipchat is the branding, the packaging, and the support.
The one thing I see ("image previews") is a feature of the client, not IRC itself. And many clients used to offer that, way back - the reason they turned it off was because it was a great vector to (e.g.) goatse someone. In any GUI-based IRC client, this is dead simple.
Most of what Hipchat seems to provide is branding and support, and I get that that's very valuable, but I don't see why that needs to be viewed as an either/or situation.