The audience for the Internet changed. IRC was great when everyone on the 'net was tech savvy, but look at what happened when people were able to pick between AOL and direct dial-up connections. Facebook is so simple my grandmother could figure it out, but even with decent clients like Colloquy, I wouldn't expect her to find her way around IRC. As for the Enterprise, HipChat and the like, especially when served via SaaS, offers more than just a chat server - server management, auditing, easy user setup, integrations to other tools.
For what it's worth, I agree that it's a shame that we are barely better off than we were 20 years ago, but I'm willing to accept that if it means widening the audience of the Internet for everyone. You shouldn't need a CS degree to surf the world's information.
Yeah, I can, of course, see how the modern alternatives are easier to use. I'm just sad that, instead of making simple IRC clients, nicer frontends for newsgroups, easier mailing lists, we now have ad-hoc solutions that are mainly meant to keep you locked into their system.
More like peoples computers just don't come with IRC. A lot of modern IRC clients (I use konversation) are basically:
Open program.
Automatically connect to freenode / quakenet / other major networks, sometimes even intelligently enough to try to reserve the username or users contact info nickname.
Hit a join channel button, or just get prompted the first time to name a channel.
Ommit #, it works fine. It also gives you a picker of servers, defaulting to freenode in konversations case.
Join a channel and chat.
But there is no means to notify users this exists, or how it works, or how to get on it. There is no money to be made in getting everyone on IRC.
I can assure you that 20 years ago there were plenty of teenagers who hadn't even finished high school that were on IRC, not to mention large numbers of students in non-CS degrees.
For what it's worth, I agree that it's a shame that we are barely better off than we were 20 years ago, but I'm willing to accept that if it means widening the audience of the Internet for everyone. You shouldn't need a CS degree to surf the world's information.