i'm sick of hearing 'for nerds' as a disparaging remark about the lack of business appeal.

the line I mention is talking about the success of Slack relative to IRC ; well, guess what -- before slack plenty of companies ran their discourse through IRC for little to no cost; the fact that Slack raised xx-Billions of dollars is only evidence of their business ability, not that they somehow 'solved irc'.

Someone re-created an IRC clone, polished it, and then schmoozed businesses into buying a service that was essentially previously free.

Don't like that re-telling of events? Well I don't like the premise that IRC was a 'nerd' tool that was waiting for some geniuses to polish it into a billions-dollar gem.

As a former IRC nerd I think this drastically undersells what Slack accomplished.