I wonder if this is because Microsoft is becoming better and better at embracing open source when it sees a business advantage to do so, or if it's simply a last-ditch effort to keep Messenger alive as more and more people use it less frequently or not at all because the likes of smartphones, apps, and Facebook (Chat) are becoming more widely adopted.
Doesn't this basically summarize Microsoft's entire business strategy these days? Wait until some piece of tech is firmly entrenched, then move to implement your own instance, more often than not with an enterprise angle. More often than not infuriatingly incompatible unless your entire stack is Microsoft.
This happened with iPhone, cloud hosting, touch/tablet OS's; the list is endless. The only surprising thing is it took them this long to realize that Live Messenger needed to get onboard with Jabber if it's going to survive.
Wasn't that Microsoft's playbook from the very beginning? Industry writers were commenting on that behaviour in the 80s and 90s. Microsoft was always better copying other people's ideas and outcompeting them in the late game.
I'm guessing it's the former. In the past 2 weeks I've heard MS submit a patch to Redis, they've helped bring Node.js to Windows, Phil Haack joined GitHub primarily to bring C# into that open source community's limelight,...
and now this. Seems to me like someone's been pushing the open source agenda within Microsoft.
