What I find strange about chat is that standards (that people use) have not arisen and that technical progress seems to be glacial.
I first saw chat on VAX/VMS machines in high school in the 1980s. Circa 1990 there were many incompatible email systems, but by 2000 everything was going over SMTP.
In the meantime we've had ICQ, AIM, Skype, MSN Messenger, Google Talk, Paltalk, Slack, IRC and I am sure. The one thing they have in common is that they seem to have almost the same feature set and haven't really improved over time.
There is a standard in the form XMPP which seems to have market penetration into military and law enforcement markets, but almost everybody in the enterprise is using Slack while privately bitching about how it doesn't really integrate well with their systems. (e.g. it looks like it integrates well, getting 80% of the way is easy, 15% is hard, but the last 5% is impossible because of Slack's business model.)
People say that Slack is searchable, but the Startup de jour in 2019 is always complaining that it can't find documents and every week they add some new place to store documents on the hope that they'll be able to find them.
One of these days they will see the irony in this, but at that point you will see platforms move to make federated search and/or indexing infeasible.
I first saw chat on VAX/VMS machines in high school in the 1980s. Circa 1990 there were many incompatible email systems, but by 2000 everything was going over SMTP.
In the meantime we've had ICQ, AIM, Skype, MSN Messenger, Google Talk, Paltalk, Slack, IRC and I am sure. The one thing they have in common is that they seem to have almost the same feature set and haven't really improved over time.
There is a standard in the form XMPP which seems to have market penetration into military and law enforcement markets, but almost everybody in the enterprise is using Slack while privately bitching about how it doesn't really integrate well with their systems. (e.g. it looks like it integrates well, getting 80% of the way is easy, 15% is hard, but the last 5% is impossible because of Slack's business model.)
People say that Slack is searchable, but the Startup de jour in 2019 is always complaining that it can't find documents and every week they add some new place to store documents on the hope that they'll be able to find them.
One of these days they will see the irony in this, but at that point you will see platforms move to make federated search and/or indexing infeasible.