The only actual reason given in the article is that EFnet etc. suffer from netsplits – the remaining 95% of the text complain about non-problems (age of the protocol) and the fact that an infected computer is, well, infected.<p>So IRC would be perfectly fine to use if the company ran their own server, which is far from impossible. And while I’d prefer a XMPP server, this is definitely not a big problem.