I’m about a week into a switch from HipChat to Slack. I know a lot of people are deleting HipChat with scornful words of good riddance. But when I did it today, I thought about the people. Stay with me a moment… 1/
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In 2012, all I knew was I didn’t want to run my own IRC server, because I’d been through that. I had just founded a monitoring company; running chat infra was the last thing I wanted to do. Build your product, not someone else’s. So I looked for managed alternatives. 2/
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There was a company called Grove that ran hosted IRC for you, and we used that for a bit. I forget what was wrong, but something just wasn’t working for us, and I think they were the only option that seemed doable for hosted IRC per se. So we looked for non-IRC alternatives. 3/
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I kind of really didn’t want to buy into a product that was reinventing bespoke IRC, but *shrug*. We checked out HipChat and it seemed solid. This was probably mid-2013, before Slack launched. It worked well, had advantages over IRC even. It was a win for us as a company. 4/
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HipChat has been a solid product for us. Basic chat with some extras, generally has worked really well. Most importantly, it’s created a ton of value for us. We have a distributed team and it’s helped us collaborate better. We’ve wired up a lot of things to it. Win, win, win. 5/
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So now Slack has won in the marketplace, and we’re switching, but I’m thinking about the people who built HipChat, and I just want them to know how grateful I am for their work. How many things they’ve made possible, how much they’ve helped me and so many others. 6/
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This makes me realize how quickly the space has changed in the last decade: Companies have shifted from IRC, Campfire, Flowdock, Hipchat. Lots of good folks behind all of these tools.
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