Slack, Hipchat, Campfire, etc. are all just IRC for normal people. There is without a doubt a barrier to entry to IRC that actually requires a bit of understanding of how the protocol works. "I'm in #this-channel-you-told-me-about, but no one else is in here, wtf?". "Oh, you're on the wrong network - it's EFNet, not Freenode".
There is no such barrier for the current set of chat apps. Download > Login with google, start chatting with the person who invited you. Search history? File sharing? No need to remember anything about dcc/xdcc, no need to manage servers running bots, no need to manage anything, really; it's all taken care of by the nerds that run the service.
I think one might actually be able to build a business by building a Slack that runs on top of IRC, and releasing client apps that actually significantly reduce the flexibility that a standard IRC client gives you. If you can get the on boarding flow to invite -> download -> log in -> start chatting with the people you want to chat with, you could crush slack (assuming you had the marketing budget to compete with theirs).
I think, however, that IRC will remain in some ways as a small haven from eternal September (haha, yeah, I know). The barrier to entry is a feature, not a bug.
> I think one might actually be able to build a business by building a Slack that runs on top of IRC, and releasing client apps that actually significantly reduce the flexibility that a standard IRC client gives you. If you can get the on boarding flow to invite -> download -> log in -> start chatting with the people you want to chat with, you could crush slack (assuming you had the marketing budget to compete with theirs).
Someone did, it's called IRCCloud.
That's the entire problem I've been talking about above: Anything you can imagine regarding IRC already exists. The only issue is that you don't know about it yet, and have to find it. And without marketing, or any lists of what is good and not, this is hard.
Then start actual marketing. And make sure that I can switch from Slack to your product without any hangups, and have exactly the same feature parity, especially for non-technical users.
