I really wish IRC and other open protocols had a chance against Slack and the entire walled-garden ecosystem. Personally I'm highly willing to do some extra-setup in order to at least own the history of all my messages (not to mention the ridiculousness of separate Slack groups requiring separate logins) - of course this is a developers take, which excludes all the other employees..
Ultimately the Out-of-the-box some setup required has in as much doomed IRC as desktop Linux. The obvious problem being that the people that are interested in working on these things for free are nerds who are okay with the setup -- which just perpetuates a closed-cycle.
We are providing an option to bring together walled gardens with matrix.org: an open standard for federated distributed and persistent communications. It does give you the option to run your own server and bridge to other services like IRC (and Slack actually).
We're also building Vector.im as a glossy client on top of Matrix to precisely address the fact that non techy users need something easy to use.
So all this might answer your concern :)
Ultimately the Out-of-the-box some setup required has in as much doomed IRC as desktop Linux. The obvious problem being that the people that are interested in working on these things for free are nerds who are okay with the setup -- which just perpetuates a closed-cycle.