Google dropping XMPP leading to the death of the protocol is a distortion of truth. Sure it hurted the XMPP federation back then, but this is just one aspect.
For one, XMPP had many competitors since the beginning including other open federated ones like IRC. XMPP was just a new standard with new interesting features. Most people used propietary messenger like AIM back then.
Imo the most critical reason why XMPP did not become mainstream, was because they slept through the early smartphone phase. iOS for a long time had no client compatible with XMPP servers. Smartphones nowadays dominate the global messenger market tho, which made federated XMPP helpless against the rise of WhatsApp, iMessage and so on.
In the desktop space XMPP never really overshadowed IRC significantly. IRC kept all the old tech nerds, while Discord now swallows all the younger nerds. Skype, Microsoft Teams and Zoom took the rest.
XMPP again slept through all of this. Jitsi and Matrix/Element rose up as new open standards because of that as well.
Google Talk was never that big in comparison. Even if Google had kept their XMPP implementation on life support to this day, I would doubt, that federated XMPP would be a big player even then.
Also towards the end, Google Talk had less XMPP extensions then the rest of the XMPP federation. That’s the opposite of “Extend”.
Google dropping XMPP leading to the death of the protocol is a distortion of truth. Sure it hurted the XMPP federation back then, but this is just one aspect.
For one, XMPP had many competitors since the beginning including other open federated ones like IRC. XMPP was just a new standard with new interesting features. Most people used propietary messenger like AIM back then.
Imo the most critical reason why XMPP did not become mainstream, was because they slept through the early smartphone phase. iOS for a long time had no client compatible with XMPP servers. Smartphones nowadays dominate the global messenger market tho, which made federated XMPP helpless against the rise of WhatsApp, iMessage and so on.
In the desktop space XMPP never really overshadowed IRC significantly. IRC kept all the old tech nerds, while Discord now swallows all the younger nerds. Skype, Microsoft Teams and Zoom took the rest.
XMPP again slept through all of this. Jitsi and Matrix/Element rose up as new open standards because of that as well.
Google Talk was never that big in comparison. Even if Google had kept their XMPP implementation on life support to this day, I would doubt, that federated XMPP would be a big player even then.
Also towards the end, Google Talk had less XMPP extensions then the rest of the XMPP federation. That’s the opposite of “Extend”.