On instant messaging & stale office products

Just saw this on Google+

——

Mike Taylor 00:42  -  Discussion

I’m curious how many protocols they end up supporting

François Beaufort - Google+ - Google Chrome Team has just started working on a… »

Google Chrome Team has just started working on a multiplatform chat client Chrome Packaged App named “Champ”. It may not be used eventually but I do think…

—–

Which prompted me to respond in a not so kind way that’s worth repeating here in an expanded form.

It should really be one, XMPP(Jabber IM), or maybe 2 adding IRC which appears to survive whatever, probably because it’s open.  After all Jabber is THE standardised protocol for instant messaging(IM).  We don’t see new email systems popping up all the time so why do people (Skype/Microsoft) think it’s OK to do this with IM?

The ‘new’ devil on the block is Skype, it’s not a new product, but again being pushed forward by Microsoft who insist on continuing to lock their customers into systems that are proprietary and don’t play well with other IT systems. 

If only we (the greater IT community) could convince the politicians of the world that an effective monopoly on the enterprise desktop is and has been the main limiting factor in ICT led productivity in the workplace, because this vendor doesn’t really innovate or adopt ratified standards for interoperability.  

To expand on the above, how many more years are people going to be sat in front of MS Office, a stale excuse for a productivity suite at a time when the office boundaries are vanishing fast, in both physical and electronic terms. 

Usually white elephants collapse under their own weight, take Nokia for example, but often that’s because someone out innovated them (Apple in this case) but in the desktop IT space that’s a big ask and even the likes of Apple isn’t going to bump Microsoft out of the business world anytime soon.

So to answer the question above, it’ll have to support a few protocols at least and continue to do so until the people using these systems realise that they don’t have to endure the hassle of having buddy lists on 3 or 4 different platforms. Just as they don’t have to run multiple email systems.