AOL did their best to lock everyone out of Oscar/AIM, such as requiring a checksum of (a random part of) the .exe -- and they were the WhatsApp-equivalent-800-lbs-gorilla of the time.
(And that's mostly why it didn't matter what anyone else did). In fact, the closest thing resembling an IM standard, XMPP, was chosen not on technical merit, but rather becase the IETF group set up to standardize was (essentially) sabotaged by the members each driving their own agenda -- and after 3 years with nothing to show, when the working group disbanded, Jabber -- which was mediocre, but actually had working servers and clients -- was adopted as a standard.
I was tangentially involved with that process at the time, it was a shitshow; I would guess that's common for many standardization processes, but to my young and naive eyes it looked almost unbelievable.
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AOL did their best to lock everyone out of Oscar/AIM, such as requiring a checksum of (a random part of) the .exe -- and they were the WhatsApp-equivalent-800-lbs-gorilla of the time.
(And that's mostly why it didn't matter what anyone else did). In fact, the closest thing resembling an IM standard, XMPP, was chosen not on technical merit, but rather becase the IETF group set up to standardize was (essentially) sabotaged by the members each driving their own agenda -- and after 3 years with nothing to show, when the working group disbanded, Jabber -- which was mediocre, but actually had working servers and clients -- was adopted as a standard.
I was tangentially involved with that process at the time, it was a shitshow; I would guess that's common for many standardization processes, but to my young and naive eyes it looked almost unbelievable.