Email is really useful and nobody cares. - If you need a way to discuss specific topics with specific people over time, you make a new mailing list. - If you

Email is really useful and nobody cares. - If you need a way to discuss specific topics with specific people over time, you make a new mailing list. - If you want to have one single conversation within a specific group and topic, and follow it logically, just reply to the thread. You can forward the thread and the conversation remains, and can continue. - You can ignore all conversations that aren't addressed to you, or go back and read them, one thread at a time. - You can archive all of this, hierarchically, per mailing list, and search or browse it later. Now - if you want to have a LIVE conversation, nothing's going to beat a chat room. It really does not matter what kind of chat room. But sometimes you join the chat late - it's good to see the old conversation and catch up. And after the conversation, you might want a log of it later. Somehow, most chat services in the world seem to miss this. IRC has kludges that support this. Jabber was supposed to fix this (I think?), in a platform-independent way. Yet nobody wants to use Jabber. (Probably because most implementations suck or are incomplete) Here's my question: If an entire ecosystem of software has thrived for a generation using existing tools (IRC, mailing lists, and now Jabber), why the hell is every corporation in the world dead-set on running away from them screaming? THEY'VE WORKED FOR 20+ YEARS! edit answering my own question: they don't have support contracts.