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The pricing for Slack seems insane for something that was essentially a solved problem 30 years ago.
Admittedly, I haven't used IRC much and I know the UI/UX isn't the best, but that could probably be fixed pretty easily and tacked on to the existing messaging infrastructure?
Also IRC doesn't store message history, which is kinda a really important thing.
Proprietary chat apps on the other hand go bad like cheese. When they start out there is a honeymoon period where they know they have to perfect onboarding because otherwise people won't use it, but once it gets a critical mass they fire the engineers and stop fixing bugs and keeping up with a changing environment.
The story is "want to try a meeting with Zoom?" and people would say "it's got to suck right?" and you'd reply "it works as well as Skype did 10 years ago" and then they try it and say "Wow!" but you know ten years from now it will be legendary that Zoom sucks and there will be something new that people are comparing to what Zoom used to be.
There ought to be a law mandating chat interoperability, Facebook Messenger could actually have a longer shelf life if you could talk with Microsoft Messenger because competition and the threat of exit would keep them on their toes.
There's no point in overhauling IRC when Matrix is a much more modern alternative that includes E2EE and such things out of the box, no custom extensions required. Also IRC doesn't store message history, which is kinda a really important thing.
That said, all your private messages as well as any messages in public channels can be logged and will persist on your PC until you delete them.
> The pricing for Slack
You've answered your own question there. Because "pricing" an open (as in RFC defined) IRC server is significantly more difficult than "pricing" a proprietary protocol.
So the "companies" follow the money, and setup their own proprietary silos.
I would wager it is a generational thing also.
There's no point in overhauling IRC when Matrix is a much more modern alternative that includes E2EE and such things out of the box, no custom extensions required. Also IRC doesn't store message history, which is kinda a really important thing.
Shell sessions and bouncers sort of alleviate the history issue if that is what you really need. I always thought that not having history was part of the magic of IRC. That said, all your private messages as well as any messages in public channels can be logged and will persist on your PC until you delete them.
For Matrix, you can say "go to chat.company.com" and click log in with Google.
Slack, etc. pricing is a rounding error for most companies.
I mean, you seem to understand what's wrong. IRC is meaningfully worse to use than Slack/Discord. So people use stuff that's nicer to use.
> but that could probably be fixed pretty easily and tacked on to the existing messaging infrastructure?
If it were easy, it would have already been done. "The UX isn't great" isn't a recent discovery, it's something that's been known for a very long time.
I regularly use two messaging platforms: Discord, and Element. The former is proprietary and the latter is open. Element is meaningfully worse to actually use. And it's still the best Matrix client I personally have used.
That fundamentally doesn't work on IRC, as it's message-oriented (like XMPP, which has some elaborate bolt-ons and hacks to implement history that actually work ok), not history-oriented like e.g. Matrix.