> Google killed XMPP interop because it was a pain in the ass and a technical obstacle. Yet Talk/XMPP was, tied with Hangouts, Google's longest-lived chat syst

> Google killed XMPP interop because it was a pain in the ass and a technical obstacle. Yet Talk/XMPP was, tied with Hangouts, Google's longest-lived chat system to date (officially, anyway - last I knew a few weeks ago, it was still accepting XMPP client connections). XMPP has an open and diverse community, and I assure you there are many competent server developers involved in its development. Disclaimer, I'm heavily involved in XMPP, though I wasn't around for its conception. I've implemented it from both a client and server perspective. I'm not here to claim XMPP is perfect, but it's absolutely a good fit for its problem domain (an interoperable messaging standard). As a software engineer I've implemented many other protocols too. I assure you that all protocols have their quirks, XMPP included, but I've yet to see anything that would be a suitable replacement. I blame Google's culture as an organization for their inability to succeed at messaging. I blame financial incentives for large companies choosing to build silos rather than interoperate/federate. Whether that uses XMPP or not I really don't care - all the big players have had plenty of time to propose an alternative (or participate in XMPP development, as Google did for a period). I think only regulation can save us at this point.