> Slack is vastly more functionality than MSN messenger.

I don't buy that. Because you can attach bots? or make calls, custom emoji? (you can do all of these on MSN) and more (like theme customisations and font changes!)

> How do you know the RAM usage of gchat?

You can see each tab's memory usage with Safari on MacOS as it's tied into the Activity Monitor.

Google Cloud Console uses 989MB for me, for instance.

> Because you can attach bots? or make calls, custom emoji?

Because you can access an indexed repository of every conversation your team has had, organized by grouping, channel, digression, and participants, even if you weren't present, online, or even a member at the time. What's the MSN Messenger approach to this? Everyone join one giant group conversation window and try to keep the conversation straight, everyone send every file to every person each time, everyone keep every file you've been sent, grep through your 5 years of logs to find stuff, and hope you never need to use a different device or lose your connection? Slack provides the ability to reply to specific messages in digressionary threads, which is a key part of keeping busy channels readable in the present, let alone in the future, and the only reason many conversations can span long periods without getting lost in noise. I shudder to imagine my job relying on staying up to date with an MSN Messenger window with 44 participants.

Then there's integration with the bugtracker and support ticketing system, and Keybase, putting live-updating views from spreadsheets and the database directly into chat, drop-in/out call channels (which aren't comparable to MSN/WLM's direct calls), compatibility channels to migrate from IRC and mailing lists without losing anybody... those don't count as extra functionality? There's a reason professional teams use Slack when they never used MSN/WLM.

Those advantages (offline file storage, sorting by subtopics and threads, access to things from before you were even a member) sounds largely like forum software from ~20 years ago too, which only required decent hardware on the server side. Integrated chat and forum software (with office software thrown in to boot). The original comment I had made was about MSN Messenger being functionally equivalent to Google chat.

> Because you can attach bots? or make calls, custom emoji?

And to add on to that - these features shouldn't have any noticeable resource consumption of the kind people are complaining about. Bots shouldn't affect performance at all. The ability to make calls should have no performance impact when a call is not being made. People aren't complaining about Slack with a call being slow - they're complaining about Slack taking a long time to start up, and Slack using lots of memory and CPU just sitting there doing nothing.

> You can see each tab's memory usage with Safari on MacOS as it's tied into the Activity Monitor.

That's not necessarily a good proxy. Safari, like Chrome and Firefox over-allocate far more than they need speculatively for caching & rendering purposes. There was a whole blog post on HN that completely bungled memory metrics when looking at the integrated Activity Monitor https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26179817