When large MMO guilds have had a mostly trouble free chat client that supports a few thousand concurrent users on the free time and good will of admins I'm loathe to believe that this shit is impossible
I'm not sure how you read from my comment that I'm saying 'this shit is impossible'. I'm simply saying in many organizations 'how fast the intern got it up and running' is not always a valid indicator of how ready it is to be deployed to a few thousand concurrent users.
For example, large MMO guilds have a quite different regulatory environment from, say, a large healthcare organization in the US governed by HIPAA. It's an extreme example, sure, but a homegrown, dumbed down solution, might be the only way to ensure regulatory compliance.
It doesn't take a lot of imagination to come up with other scenarios. I can't defend Uber doing it because I'm not involved, but large MMO guilds are not archetypal of enterprise systems.
