[subway]

Lync 2013 fully supports XMPP federation. Cisco's IM offerings support XMPP federation. IBM's Sametime supports XMPP federation.

Numerous organizations have deployments of these and other, smaller XMPP IM servers.

As for cherry picking standards, isn't that exactly what you're doing with your statement on Chromium and web standards?

[Maarten88]

Lync's native protocol is SIP, a standard that Google could also have adopted years ago, but they went with the more modern and 'better' competing XMPP standard.

Microsoft went through a lot of problems implementing SIP it for Lync and its predecessors LCS and OCS, but they remained within the standard and worked on interoperability and improving the standard around security, even if it took more time than going it alone.

The roles of Microsoft and Google have certainly switched around.

[snaky]

Lync looks really nice with that

edit: XMPP federation feature is not available in Ofice365 Lync options, that's sad

[subway]

To be fair, while the Office suite itself is pretty decent these days, Office 365 is terrible. Microsoft is still very much a software company and not a services company.

[snaky]

If you are talking about Office web-apps, maybe. But what is wrong with their hosted Exchange and SharePoint?

[VikingCoder]

If IBM's Sametime supported launching without crashing, it would be a better feature than their XMPP federation.