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by Hoff
5479 days ago
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If this had happened for email, we would have had to deal with a myriad of different clients, servers and 'interworking' gateways. That was the networking prior to the wide adoption of IP and SMTP. There were DECnet mail clients, and clients for various other networking protocols, and users needed to know explicit bang-path routes and gateways. Seeing this churn and this fragmentation is unpleasant, but it also means that you can see rapid advances and new features and different approaches. Once the market matures and the churn settles down, we'll see more of this sort out toward protocol consolidation. In general, areas with high churn are some of the most interesting parts of the whole computer business. They're among the least mature, and often with the most innovations. |
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What irks me is that the IETF keeps banging away at protocols to solve issues like the transition from PSTN to IP (e.g. ENUM), or IM interoperability, but then nobody really implements them, or as in the case of ENUM, the incumbent telcos, at least in the USA, sit on it forever. Or some startup cooks up their own solution and kills it, like Skype.
I'm all for interoperability sorting itself out, but it does not seem to happen in the messaging/real time communications space. We still have SMS, a gazillion IM protocols, and many isolated islands of video calling. Skype, Qik, MSN, Yahoo, FaceTime, Google, I could go on. On top of that is the confounding issue of different audio and video codecs and whatever patent issues surround them. A formidable gordian knot, of which it will be interesting to see how it will be cut - if ever.