Heh, not only that, back in the day even the IM clients started to interop, what with Jabber and Trillian and Pidgin and such. There was a nice few years where

Heh, not only that, back in the day even the IM clients started to interop, what with Jabber and Trillian and Pidgin and such. There was a nice few years where you could talk to most people on most major IM networks with whatever client you liked. But then the ecosystem providers realized how much more money there was in walled gardens / blue bubbles and started closing it all off. RCS was Google's desperate countermeasure to iMessage, which worked superbly for years while Android still had to use SMS. That's why most of the rest of the world moved to Whatsapp, Wechat, Line, etc.