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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.
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.
When men used to be men
Protocols will become more proprietary, telco companies will continue to *squeeze* money out of consumers for sending text messages over networks which would otherwise be utilizing much more bandwidth for a normal voice call, and proprietary IM providers such as AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo will not collectively work toward a standard, because they have their hands too deep in consumers' pockets to see that it would benifit more people than just them to work together for a common good.
No, I don't think the major IM players will settle on a standard. The best thing we can hope for is that the Jabber protocol catches on and we all have an open IM standard.
That's most likely not going to happen, though, until the rest of the world catches on to the whole OSS movement. And at that point, there are going to be so much better things out there than text IM that people are working on together that it won't matter anyway.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
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.)
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
There was, in my opinion, a glaring omission in this article: no mention of IRC. I find this interesting because there is no reason why IRC shouldn't be adopted as the protocol of choice for text instant messaging. It's more stable than all the others. It interoperates nicely. There are IRC servers running on all kinds of operating systems. Endless clients.
How many millions of people use IRC? Why not adopt it as a mainstream system? I was surprised that the interviewer, being from Sendmail, so glaringly ignored throwing this into the mix. IRC can do everything instant messaging can, and then some.
Both the Mr. Ford and the interviewer failed in their mission: the former may not be much of an architect if he's willing to overlook this, and the latter should've asked more incisive questions.
Cheers,
Eugene
http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
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.
For the market they're aiming at ? No, not at all. Remember, they're trying to sell a single, everything-you-need solution to normal people who just want to go out and buy a single thing to do it all.
There are people out there who think adjustable seats, air conditioning and radios are worthless fluff in cars, as well. Fortunately they're in the minority and most manufacturers ignore them.
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.
These people are few in number and generally not at all interested in Windows (or a similar product like OS X) anyway.
What's beyond me is why don't we hear a great number of people (regular users) complaining about this waste of disk space [...]
Because their last PC came standard with an 80G hard disk. 1.5G for Windows isn't even 2% of that (relative to common hard disk sizes, Windows XP isn't really any bigger than Windows 3.1). Disk space is dirt cheap - a few hundred megs here or there is pocket change.
Personally, I've lost interest in the carefully chosen custom install - because I've now got so much disk space that the only really compelling reason for doing so has disappeared. Why should I care if an application wants to install to 100MB or 150MB when I've got 50G free on the machine and another half a terabyte sitting on a fileserver ?
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 ...
The OS/application line has been blurry ever since the first machine that used a CLI shell instead of a bunch of flashing lights and switches rumbled into life. "Bundling" an IM client (or a web browser) is logically no different to bundling a text editor, or ping, or ftp, or any number of "core applications" that have been being "bundled" with operating systems for decades.
Not to mention unix boxes have been shipping with an IM client for donkey's years - talk.
"OS experts" aren't voicing their opinions because by and large they have grasped the concept that the thing academically defined as an "operating system" bears little resemblence to the thing commercially defined as an "operating system". The only commercial products that are even remotely similar to the academic definition of "operating system" are embedded OSes.
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".
"Civis Europaeus sum!"