[rthomas6]

As an outsider to web dev, I think there's a lot of wheel reinventing going on in web technologies over the past 10 years or so, and we still haven't fully caught up to where we were.

XMPP was a federated instant messenger protocol that worked extremely well and was widely used. It generally worked better than Element/Matrix or MS Teams in my experience. It was used by over 10 million people by 2003.

Adobe Flash. It had a lot of security and usability issues, but HTML5 has still not caught up to it. Any bright 15 year old could spend a day and make their own game.

Makefiles. People hate on them, but if you get around their weird syntax and other eccentricities, it's hard to find a better build system. They've been around since the 70s, and I have not seen another build system achieve feature parity.

[frfl]

> It generally worked better than [...] MS Teams in my experience

That's a very very very low bar to cross.