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Microsoft Messenger Architect On The Future Of IM
CowboyRobot writes "ACM Queue has an interview with Peter Ford, chief architect for MSN Messenger, by Eric Allman, CTO of Sendmail. They discuss the present and future states of IM, the current big players as industry shuffles toward standardization, some of the social implications of IM versus email or telephone, and technical issues such as using SIP as opposed to XMPP (Microsoft is pushing for SIP, everyone else seems to favor XMPP). They don't bring up Wallop, Microsoft's community application that will be built into Longhorn, but that's surely part of the long-term discussion."
There are two doors. The door to your right leads to SIP, and the salvation of Redmond. The door to the left leads back to the matrix, to XMPP, and to the end of your species. As you adequately put, the problem is choice. But we already know what you're going to do, don't we? Already I can see the chain reaction, the chemical precursors that signal the onset of emotion, designed specifically to overwhelm logic, and reason. An emotion that is already blinding you from the simple, and obvious truth: XMPP is going to die, and there is nothing that you can do to stop it.
I do agree that you will see consolidation over time. You could probably argue that the e-mail experience that you and I and a lot of others lived through over the past 20 to 25 years is probably going to be repeated--perhaps more quickly than last time because the Internet makes that kind of evolution easier.
We're gonna go through this spam thing again, aren't we? Man it's like living in Groundhog Day. On the other hand, this does give us a use for Bunker Buster bombs - instant localized retaliation against any spammer. And their families. And friends. And neighborhood.
Which is as it should be.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
The question is, do *you* know what pundit means?