Jokes aside, the article did hit the nail on the head in its critique of realtime comms. That said, there was always a subset of any team that seemed to have cold feet / anxiety / or other resistance to writing the longer-form messages of newsgroups.

I think if I had to pick between shallow, but broadly used comms, and slow but heterogeneously used comms, I'd still pick the latter.

I can't believe that they even wrote a new app when they could just have installed mailman, or any other mailing list server, or even a news server.

If I were to create a company I would create mailing lists for discussion and a wiki for consolidation of knowledge. In my humble opinion, there is no need for new fancy apps. The tools are there.

What does the new app they created provide that cannot be done with the tools I mentionned?

I feel old. I'm 36 years old and I see too many articles of people discovering stuff we discussed at length in the 90s. This IRC vs Usenet discussion is an old one.