[Spooky23]

According to “Spooky23’s universal law of chat”, the apogee of chat clients is circa 2002 AOL Instant Messenger, and chat clients can only get worse with time.

Teams is unique as a combination of chat, phone and SharePoint client. Thus it was born an abomination and the laws of nature dictate that it must only get worse.

[hiatus]

AIM would spawn a new window for each conversation. That hardly seems like the pinnacle. Pidgin, with interop with a ton of protocols was superior, and was also an amalgam integrating numerous chat networks.

[datavirtue]

I see your pidgin and raise you an "interoperability." Pidgin was a thing because the chat protocols/servers were open interfaces. Gone are those days. I miss being able to use different clients for chat.

[aragilar]

No, most of the plugins for pidgin were reverse engineered.

[Spooky23]

Having been subjected to every Microsoft chat application since 2000, I can assure you that each one started worse than AIM and got progressively worse.

The only exception was driven by my employer, who opted to embed Cisco Call Manager crap into Microsoft OCS (the circa 2010 chat client). I would rather communicate via requisition notes in peoplesoft than use that shit. Whatever replaced it (iirc Lync for Enterprise Business Extreme Edition) was better.

[Rinzler89]

>and chat clients can only get worse with time

Not just chat clients, but pretty much any stable piece of SW from a major corporation that reaches peak perfection, is forced to get worse and user hostile over time, because those VPs, execs and managers in charge of it want a promotion or need to justify their bonuses on a yearly basis, so they force needless changes to have something to present to the board every year till they jump ship or retire early with their masive stock piles.

And then the next people who take over, have something to tear down and rebuild, so they can be the ones making their careers on "fixing" that product and the cycle of shittiness repeats.

They are not products anymore that need to serve the best interest of the customers, but fiefdoms and vehicles designed to propel and fuel someone's ego and career advancements at all costs.

It's an effect of perverse incentives in corporate promotions. You'll never make a career at these companies by doing QA or saying "well, the product we have was perfect already, so I did absolutely nothing to it, added no new features, just fixed some bugs and kicked back".

[Spooky23]

Truth. That's definitely the Google effect.

Microsoft is a little different as they never really rebuild. Outlook is basically the same as it was in 1995, including non-functional search. :)

[benterix]

Well, when they tried to rebuild something, they ended up removing the start menu and a couple of other things that a third party started to provide for a fee and they had to backpedal many of these changes. I finally received the update on my corporate machine where they bring back the option to ungroup apps after a couple of years...

[hutattedonmyarm]

Clearly the apogee was ICQ in the early 2000s

[Spooky23]

ICQ was a magical program for sure.

[fragmede]

uh oh

https://youtu.be/RhGHerssyk4

[aunwick]

Every rocket has apogee