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."

Comments

Microsoft vs. Everyone? Get your facts straight

[targo]

The interviewer says:

Microsoft, Lotus, Sun, and Novell seem to have settled on SIP. Intel, H-P, Hitachi, Sony, and more or less the entire open source world is going toward XMPP, sometimes better known as Jabber.

and the poster says:

Microsoft is pushing for SIP, everyone else seems to favor XMPP.

Yeah, it's fun to paint the world in black and white but this is just a blatant lie.

Re:Microsoft vs. Everyone? Get your facts straight

[muonzoo]

The wireless world, especially people moving towards 3GPP are using SIP and SIMPLE (The SIP IM extensions). Microsoft, CISCO, Ericsson, Nokia, IBM, Motorla etc are all using SIP/SIMPLE. Jabber has some traction in some areas, but SIMPLE has the massive advantage in that the VoIP infrastructure that uses SIP that many CLECs, Fortune 500 and more than a couple ILECs are deploying will work with SIMPLE too.

This is too big a deal to ignore. SIP+SIMPLE will be a powerful platform and in many cases, already is.

This isn't about Jabber vs. SIMPLE or Microsoft vs the world. SIP/SIMPLE is going to be able to leverage an amazing installed base of VoIP infractructure that Jabber will not have access to.

Re:Maybe I should RTFA, but...

[Trejkaz]

SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) has been around for a long time and AFAIK is a binary protocol. SIMPLE is built on top of SIP and provides the instant messaging functionality.

XMPP is relatively new and is based on XML (hence why it's so extensible.) There are two parts, the core (which might as well be equivalent to SIP's core) and the IM extensions.

The glaring practical difference is that there seem to be about zero open-source SIP servers, and about a dozen open-source XMPP servers (going off the list at JabberStudio which might not represent all of them.)

Re:SIP

[lordholm]

Apple are using SIP for negotiating A/V communications establishment. They are using OSCAR for remote presence and messaging, and Jabber for local/rendezvous presence and messaging.

So, they are using XMPP in the local messaging stuff, but SIP to negotiate the exchange of A/V streams. Which is really what the two protocols were designed for.

The SIP pushed for by MS discussed is actually an extension called SIMPLE.

If you want proof of iChat using XMPP, either install a packet sniffer on your network, or run "strings", "otool -tV" or the 3rd party "class-dump" utility on the executable for iChatAgent, and grep the output for "Jabber".