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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."
Trillian works great for all my needs. IRC! Man that's where it's at. What bothers me, greatly I might add, is that while the majors like Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola are busy selling IM at whatever cost their last meeting brainfarted, it is highly probable that most non-nerd people think this is the way to go. They are 0wn3d by the marketspae'k, and it's trendy so hey, cool, they love it. And there's money in it for companies to gain money per character of text, or per 32byte-max transfer. (or is it 255? tee hee)
The pundits of chargeable IM services socialize the use of the service, as a Freudian brainwash, by forming IM parties with other-sexy-trendy-phone-pundits, and I sit back wondering what the fuck is happening to the world; it should be all free, or at least the cost of hardware. It's obviously a ploy to put a price on a few bytes of data, and slap a carriage charge on top of it. Which is why I'm not at all surprised this Microsoft guy, PETER FORD (from the interview) is talking about IM. It seems that the fancier the names of the new protocols are, the more money it's going to cost. But it's mumbo-jumbo to the end user, who would gladly fork over the cash just to make it go away (and just work). That's what these pundits are counting on.
One part of the article I found interesting was the design of voice mail. I agree. It would be better to build the message at the sender's location and *then* send it.
"Does that mean 10 years, five years, two years? I couldn't predict. Quite frankly, the thing that fights against it being quickly this time around is that the communities operating with these mutually incompatible protocols are quite large. If you look at AOL's cloud or the MSN cloud or the Yahoo cloud, you're talking about fairly large, significant systems. To have them migrate and interoperate with standard protocols will happen, but it is going to take time." This also assumes that AOL or MSN or Yahoo will cry uncle first. Who serious believes that any one of them will be the first to abandon their standard for an open standard when it could mean the end of their software? Remember, we are dealing with some *SERIOUS* egos here...
Microsoft's community application that will be built into Longhorn
...
So IM will be build into Windows, and Netmeeting, and this and that and whatnot. Isn't this getting slightly ridiculous to bundle everything in an OS ? I'm sure nobody wants *all* of that installed on their hard-drive, just as I wouldn't want to install all the packages that come with my Linux distro CD, but instead I want to choose what I install and nothing else, and save disk space.
What's beyond me is why don't we hear a great number of people (regular users) complaining about this waste of disk space, and also why so few OS experts voice their concern about the fact that the OS/application boundary in Windows is so blurry it's frightening in terms of security and stability
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Meanwhile, I plan to wash my hands of the whole mess and use Jabber. Remember back when we had standards, and the internet was decentralized? It actually worked - there wasn't a single point of failure. When was the last time the entire email system went down? Jabber can offer the same reliability, and you don't aren't locked into a single server or client.
Besides being decentralized, Jabber tries to offer gateways, and many Jabber clients (such as GAIM) also play the "keep up with the proprietary protocol" game. So have the best of both worlds - get a Jabber account somewhere, and whenever your friends's servers lock out their clients of choice, convince them to get a Jabber account also.
Litigious bastards
In this sense I see even Jabber as a dead-end - give me GAIM and the other multinetwork clients anyday, and open up more peer networks to them as they are populated.
Microsoft Dream (2003)
End users are beginning to ask for it. They get jazzed about the idea of being able to start an IM session with somebody, then if that person goes offline at some point, the message being sent would be saved and retrieved at a later time.
IBM Reality (1972)
You can also leave a message for wdd to receive when he logs on by typing: send 'message' user(wdd) logon.
Please. IM can be very useful. If people aren't going to be productive, they're not going to be productive.
Hmm no, your logic is backward: there is a certain category of people who, IM or web or nothing at all, will do nothing. Those need to be fired. Another category is the people who do their work equally well and/or fast regardless of the shiny toys they have on their computer. Those need to be praise, they're not many. And the last category, the vast majority of workers, work well most of the time, but work even better without the distraction of IM, the web and whatever else.
So yeah, in many cases, they should just forbid the internet. Most accountants don't need it to do accountancy, for example. Most secretaries don't either.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
wouldn't it be easier to just read the article?
I.O.U One Sig.
It's good, at least, that gaim/trillian developers collaborate in cracking proprietary protocols.
The Raven
It can be useful when everyone is using it... Kind of like phones. Around the office, AIM was a good way to get a quick message across the building without having to spend the 5 minutes walking. "Could you check phone line 15 in the closet?" "It was loose, I switched the wires. Is it working?" "Yeah, working great. Thanks."
As a communications medium, it combines the immediacy of cellular phones with the subtlety of e-mail. Likewise, you can copy/paste, a big bonus in many technical fields. Unfortunately, if not taken seriously this can lead to abuses and general slacking, but so could phones and e-mail if that sort of thing weren't frowned upon.
Still, the holy grail is achieving a single unified standard that will allow all IM systems to interact. This is not a technical hurdle, but a financial one. Much like how the lack of inter-network text messaging killed SMS in the US, the messaging companies are all fighting hard to earn a piece of the surprisingly non-lucrative IM market. Apparently they are under the delusion that infinity times free equals a large sum of money for sufficiently large values of infinity.
If everyone ran a Jabber client, it would quickly become as indispensable as e-mail.
The ______ Agenda
"The pundits of chargeable IM services socialize the use of the service, as a Freudian brainwash, by forming IM parties with other-sexy-trendy-phone-pundits, and I sit back wondering what the fuck is happening to the world; it should be all free, or at least the cost of hardware. It's obviously a ploy to put a price on a few bytes of data, and slap a carriage charge on top of it. Which is why I'm not at all surprised this Microsoft guy, PETER FORD (from the interview) is talking about IM. It seems that the fancier the names of the new protocols are, the more money it's going to cost. But it's mumbo-jumbo to the end user, who would gladly fork over the cash just to make it go away (and just work). That's what these pundits are counting on."
Fair enough. Now answer this. Who's going to pay for reoccurent costs? Even if the clients are free, and the servers are free, and the community ssh'ed in to maintain the machines. Who's going to pay for the bandwith, or the occasional visit to replace dead hardware? We all can sneer at the crowd that doesn't live and breath technology. And wants to use it as part of their social structure. But ultimately it's their money that carries technology forward, by spreading it around like seeds, and makes it cheaper than the geeks ever would. Please thank them on your way out the door to get that inexpensive video card.
If you're going to draw parallels to email, as so many have done with these discussions in the past, you have to consider right now... how much of the world's mail infrastructure is handled by the 'open standard', SMTP, and how much of it is handled by Exchange?
Exchange may be quite popular with corporations, but outside the corporation the servers tend to be a little more standard. You might see a mail going via Exchange all the way to the boundaries of the company's network, then via SMTP to another company, and back to Exchange again.
It would be interesting to see this same phenomenon emerge here. It isn't a stretch because Jabber to SIMPLE gateways have been done already, companies such as Altova supporting both in their servers.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
He's a first-rate architect. He's one of those people who understands more than just the protocols he's dealing with at the time -- he gets the reason those protocols came into existence, what drives them, who wants to use them, how they fit with othe protocols, etc.
Peter has been pushing for SIP inside Microsoft for a long time. I was part of the design process for a couple of years, and it was a real pleasure to work with so many excellent engineers and thinkers. There is a real desire to make interoperable, public network products at Microsoft -- don't laugh, it's true. We spent YEARS making H.323 work (which is a public protocol -- anyone can implement it), but it didn't matter because, in the end, H.323 sucked. Even the Windows Messenger guys want to move to SIP, because it solves a lot of headaches for them.
The best thing about SIP is that it is fairly decentralized. It's exactly as decentralized as DNS+SMTP. If you have a domain, you can publish your SIP service records, and you can handle your own communications any way you want to (similar to SMTP). This is in contrast to the way that all of the current IM protocols work -- extremely centralized, where all of your messages go to a server, that just re-sends them to the other person.
I don't know anything about XMPP. If it's a good protocol -- awesome. But whether it's XMPP or SIP, or whatever -- it's gotta happen. Instant messaging (and other similar services) need to be decentralized, standard, and open. And for once, the people inside Microsoft agree, and are actively working on it.
I just hope they can convince the upper management layer.
No matter how many IM there are in the world, the ones left are the ones that make profit.
IM is one of those things you want other people to have so you can get hold of them at a moment's notice, but you don't like when it interrupts what you're doing. I'd say the next big thing in on-line communication will have more in common with phpBB than ICQ.
XMPP is XML-based and therefore extensible but it's bloody verbose and inefficient as an over-the-wire protocol.
Why is a guy who has a goddamn CODING STYLE named after him INTERVIEWING a guy who "architected" a ripoff of TWO successful p2p-chat protocols?
Did I miss an edit in the force, or what?
There is no technical comparison of SIP vs XMPP. From indepth one I would expect to see why features of SIP are better or worse than features of XMPP. They don't even list features to compare.
Also, they talk about XMPP and ignore Jabber user community, which has recently overgrown ICQ community by amount of users.
They talk about interoperability IM-gateway in a future tense, whil most of Jabber users already use interoperability today. For example, my Jabber client doesn't communicate directly to my ICQ or AIM buddies - it does it through the Jabber server instead.
I don't wonder they don't talk about personal/SOHO Jabber servers, which some percentage of Jabber users connect to, instead of direct connecting to public server, in a process to communicating with the rest of the world. Of course, Microsoft prefers everyone will connect directly to MSN - they don't like people building communities out of their control.
And, yes, IRC is missed. I don't like some features of IRC protocol personally too, but the fact is that IRC is here for many years, has a community, applications, and still good concepts.
Well, what do you expect from the guy, who works for Microsoft (the company responsible for so many viruses due to poor architectural design of their products) and Sendmail (the company responsible for so many spam due to poor architectural design of their main product)?
I am so disappointed that I wasted my time on RTFA.
Less is more !
I fear that the average tech person is as blind as you are.
Pool messages, read when available, then let them queue up again.
Eghads! You mean... taking responsibility and not being a slave to the device? Holy hell, what is this world coming to? Personal accountability?
Nope, that's right out. Just blame the tools and not the people for using them in the way that best suits them.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
So who are the "everyone else" who want XMPP?
Well, XMPP is orders of magnitude more popular, or at least more visible, among small businesses and end-users. There are clients for every platform you can name, and quite a few server software offerings. Many of these projects are open source. Search around on the web and you'll find a great number of fun Jabber-related projects, such as the Jabber World Map, or the multitude of mailing lists and user communities dedicated to Jabber. Even Trillian and Gaim support XMPP/Jabber. There are thousands of Jabber servers running today. Who the heck uses a SIP/SIMPLE client for IM?
Recently the Jabber Software Foundation announced that the Jabber userbase has surpassed that of ICQ. While ICQ is now the least popular of "the big 4" proprietary IM networks, this is still a significant achievement towards open & standard IM. SIMPLE isn't even on the map.
It should also be known that IBM and Apple are fence-sitters, as they both back XMPP also (IBM is a JSF sponsor, and Apple uses a form of XMPP in iChat).
So yeah, 'everyone else' really means just that.