Since then, Slack has reached a $5 billion valuation, and other companies are turning out their own enterprise chat apps in competition, such as Cisco Spark, Google’s new Hangouts Chat, and MS Teams.
In August of 2013, a young company developing an online game decided to pivot away from this venture, and productize the internal tool they had created for communication – Slack was born.
Early contenders in this space included Yammer and Clearspace, but it wasn’t until the 2010 launch of HipChat that traction started to be gained in the enterprise marketplace. Over this period, we also saw the growth of a different market that was not consumer-focused – that of enterprise chat. Facebook Messenger hit 1 billion users by the middle of 2016. Using data to operate a chat app became a more appealing option for many users.īy 2014, WhatsApp, which remains one of the most popular chat apps, had increased its feature set to include sending pictures and a host of other things and had grown its user base to 650 million active users worldwide in a period of five years. Part of the push toward mobile chat apps came because the mobile phone networks were still charging for every SMS sent. As internet and data speeds have vastly improved, the experience of communicating by mobile has grown as well, allowing better features and capabilities. Those old chat rooms were built for people sitting at a desktop or laptop, not with our phones or tablets in mind. The mid-2000s saw us with desktop-based apps such as Skype and Google Talk, allowing users to talk face-to-face with people across the world.Ĭhat apps as we know them today are a response to our desire for mobile communication abilities. The first SMS was launched by Vodafone GSM in 1992, then throughout the mid to late 90s, messenger and chat rooms such as MSN and Yahoo! became popular.
Let’s take a look at how chat apps are evolving: Chat apps – a brief historyīelieve it or not, chat apps actually date back to the 1980s, when Compuserve released CB Simulator, the first dedicated online chat service that was widely available to the public. We seem to see more technology developed in the messaging space, almost on a monthly basis as companies vie to become the app of choice. Where they used to be a fun novelty, they’re evolving to be essential tools for running businesses and keeping up with distant family or friends. We’ve taken to these apps and are now integrating them into our daily work and personal lives. Chat apps make an annual appearance in lists of the most downloaded apps.
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