I'm not sure there's another way to read "IRC channels never existed then" that isn't a comparison between IRC and hashtags...
Sure, there's a superficial resemblance inasmuch as a channel and a hashtag are words prefixed by a #, but that is where the similarities end.
The reason open standards for communication are in decline is because nobody uses them when technically better alternatives exist. Pretty much all of Hipchat/Slack's marketing copy is a laundry list of things that IRC simply cannot do without either hacky workarounds, or at all because the protocol doesn't support it.
(rant mode)
Remember that vaguely-disparaging comment here when Dropbox was announced, about how you could set up the same thing with some scripts and VCS repo?
We're nerds, that's fine. We're perfectly okay with getting our hands dirty.
Nobody else wants to do that when there's a much simpler alternative. Including nerds, because there's a lot better way to spend our time than reinventing, the hard way, something that someone else already did.
There is a need, IMO, for a nonprofit foundation that makes things like Dropbox, Hipchat, etc. but more importantly, makes them with polish, and speaking as an engineer of sorts, that means that it can't be designed by engineers. It needs to be designed to solve problems that actual users have in the way that actual users work
If you have to do things like edit .conf files, twiddle services, and so forth, you've already lost. That's plenty sysadmin friendly, but krptonite to users.
