There's a lot of things that day to day businesses users will need that Slack (and the clones) provide but IRC basically can't. And they're kind of way more fundamental to the basic interactions than your idea of adding video calls.

- User authentication, preferably via some semi-standardized form of single-signon (e.g. SAML, or maybe OAuth).

- Users being able to receive messages even when all their devices are offline.

- Users being able to connect from multiple clients at the same time, with good UX. With IRC, people doing that will have to have a separate nick for each client they connect from. And people who want to @ them or /msg them will need to know which of the near-duplicate nicks to actually choose. Choose poorly, and your message might be sent to a device where it won't be read for hours even though the recipient really is actively online.

- State sync across the clients. If I've read some specific messages on one client, they should not show up as unread on my other clients.

- A consistent user experience. In IRC there's no reliable cross-client way of tagging a message for the attention of some set of users. Sure, clients will do various levels of nick highlighting. But the exact patterns will vary between clients, and the sender can't even know whether they got the format right since the decision on the highlighting happens purely on the receiver's end.

And that's not even getting into the things that IRC can reasonably do, but that are incredibly kludgy. Say history search in a channel. No organization wants to run channel logging bots, and no normal user wants to go to a totally separate service to do a search.

Funny thing is that ICQ basically did all of that in 1998. We are going backwards in software development.

None of these would have been insurmountable had the standard not been stuck in the mud for twenty five years.

But it is, so here we are.

These comments are getting tiring. I'm not a big fan of chat apps in the workplace, but I can see their necessity. How about you get your org to use IRC and show your results.

I know you are being sarcastic but the entire US Iraq and Afghanistan wars were being operated out of mIRC chat.

> I would love to see IRC used more. Can’t we just bake video chat into that?

Then it will get too many features and get an even more clunky UI.

For me, the near-perfect solution has been available for a long time now, only costs the data overhead, and you have total control over the data. Granted, some companies prefer that another company manage that data security, so there's less on their IT hands.

Mattermost/Nextcloud/Jitsi