With all due respect to the author (whom I had the pleasure of meeting many years ago at an XMPP summit), in my opinion most of the points in this post are unfo

With all due respect to the author (whom I had the pleasure of meeting many years ago at an XMPP summit), in my opinion most of the points in this post are unfounded, and overly pessimistic. There is still a public XMPP network, just as there would still be a public network even if Google decided to put up walls around Gmail. Google's decision was almost certainly about federation, and not about technical flaws within the XMPP protocol itself. Google have never raised issues of spam before, despite participating in the XMPP community in other areas (they are a sponsor of the XMPP Standards Foundation, even). Indeed in my experience spam problems on XMPP have traditionally been very simple and localized, there is to date no general spam problem on XMPP (yet...). Attempts to solicit feedback from Google on the many proposed spam-prevention mechanisms in XMPP failed, as did requests for information about the spam problems they claimed to be seeing recently, nor the solutions they put in place to prevent them. To claims that XMPP doesn't scale - well, they have successfully run the Google Talk service for the best part of a decade now. I really don't think scalability is an issue, and they are still using (and expanding!) XMPP in other areas that also require scale (Android, for example). Finally, to say that WebRTC is replacing Jingle is just nonsense. WebRTC requires external signalling to work, and Jingle, a signalling protocol by nature, works just fine for this. Google's decision is undoubtedly a step backwards for the open IM cause, but the XMPP network is not at risk because of it. There are many users and businesses who are simply not going to entrust their communications to a third party, and many of those do want federation. This hasn't changed, Google can't change it.