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I’ve always assumed it was because it came after IM chat clients were already popular? I think ICQ for instance was measuring hundreds of millions of users befo

by olliej 4y ago

I’ve always assumed it was because it came after IM chat clients were already popular? I think ICQ for instance was measuring hundreds of millions of users before the first jabber/xmpp announcement? I vaguely recall there being something else as well as ICQ but we’re talking back to high school for me so well out of the range of good/clear memory. I think messenger also came into existence at around the same time as jabber so concurrent development presumably meant completely independent protocol, so it wouldn’t even be subject to embrace/extend/extinguish - this was the height of MS monopoly so presumably it meant essentially “everyone” instantly had messenger?

olliej 4y ago
Goddammit I forgot AIM, that was the other one. So by the time jabber and xmpp came around there were giant existing networks: AIM, ICQ, Messenger. Obviously none of them had any business reason to adopt an open, etc protocol. Additionally even if they wanted to, actually doing it would likely have been a significant engineering challenge, due to the need to maintain compatibility between client versions.