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What's so original about the Slack ui? It's channels on the left and conversation on the right. A lot of irc clients look this way.

Sure but this is a clone down to the details. Tell me one IRC client that looks like Slack in the same way.

mirc with users on right, channels on left, chat in middle

centre is basically a copy of hipchat...

Slack borrowed a lot from earlier UIs, too. It's not like Slack is hugely innovative in this department, anyway. You pay for the service, not the UI.

For me the UI and its interactions is part of the service. UIs are really dominant when it comes to experience of a service.

you are missing the `big picture` as they say.

Which is?