When the Eagles are Silent…

Tuesday September 14th 2004, 10:15 pm Printer Friendly Version
Filed under:Social Software
Posted By: Matt

..the parrots begin to jabber. - Winston Churchill

Slashdot had a story today pointing to a couple of articles that discuss the upcoming version of MacOS. Apparently the next release of iChat includes support for the Jabber protocol. For those who weren’t paying attention, Jabber is a high-profile open source project that aims to create a universal standard for instant messaging. It has already produced several intriguing-looking draft standards.

This is a welcome trend since, at very least, it shows momentum towards adopting a common standard. At the same time, I don’t believe that this is necessarily a harbinger of things to come. Apple has a lot more to gain from pushing operability than the Windows-centric clients. Microsoft, of course, would rather keep everyone playing in its sandbox, and if Mac users feel left out, why they should just adopt Windows! AOL and Yahoo are much more interested in locking users into premium services that expanding the size of the IM market through open standards. Apple, on the other hand, wants to get people to dump Windows, and the fact that they can’t easily chat with Windows users if they do is not helping its cause.


2 Comments »

  1. Surely, you mean “harbinger”…;-)

    You’re spot-on otherwise. If anything will ever break the Windows Juggernaut, it will be the combined pressure of peripheral apps like i-Tunes, chat, etc. I wouldn’t hold my breath, though.

    Nice job on the blog btw.

    Comment by Dan Backhaus — 10/9/2004 @ 1:41 am

  2. Alright, who let in the grammar police? :-)

    I fixed it. Turns out the original meaning is “one who provides lodging,” related to the French verb héberger. Somehow it evolved from that to have its current semi-metaphysical meaning.

    Comment by Matt — 10/9/2004 @ 9:21 am

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