Slashdot Mirror
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
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
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.
As long as the underlying protocols stay free and open (be it soap, irc, jabber or whatever) then if someone wants to write a closed source interface to it, that's their perogative, and of course they do so at their own risks. As great as it is to work as an (open) team, there is still something to be said for going it on your (closed) own.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
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.
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 !