HipChat

» see hipchat.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

hipchat launched in 2010 as a hosted chat room product for software teams. it was emoticons, code snippets with syntax highlighting, and persistent rooms that did not disappear when you closed the tab. atlassian bought it in march 2012, bolted it into the jira and confluence cluster, and for a couple of years it was a default answer to "what does your dev team use to talk."

then slack happened. slack launched in 2013 with better integrations, a more inviting interface, and a sales motion that fit the way teams actually adopted tools, person by person. by 2017 atlassian had a problem. its solution was stride, a cloud-rebuild of hipchat with new features and a new name. stride launched in september 2017 and lived 17 months.

i missed hipchat. small turkish dev teams in the early 2010s were still defaulting to skype groups, msn habits that did not die when msn did, and email threads with too many people cc'd. by the time team chat became a category of software people paid for, slack was already the default question and hipchat was the answer some companies had locked into before realizing they did not have to.

~ the record ~

~ how it actually ended ~

on july 26, 2018 atlassian announced both hipchat cloud and stride would be discontinued on february 15, 2019, and that slack had bought the intellectual property. atlassian took a minority equity stake in slack. customers were migrated to slack. the announcement framed it as a partnership; in practice it was a competitor paying you to walk your remaining users to its door.

~ what came after ~

hipchat data center, the self-hosted version companies ran on their own hardware, got a longer runway. it limped to the same conclusion in 2020. the brand is now a wikipedia entry that the atlassian website occasionally still has to redirect away from. slack itself got bought by salesforce in 2021. the customer base that atlassian sold cleanly is now inside an even bigger acquisition.

~ what got buried with it ~

the green check mark was hipchat's small contribution to the field: a tiny visual confirmation that your message had been read by everyone in the room. slack rebuilt the same affordance differently. the larger thing it buried was a particular kind of atlassian product strategy, the idea that you could buy a category leader and out-execute the upstart. hipchat is the proof of how that ends when the upstart is faster than you.

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