For what it's worth, for a time Google Chat federated other XMPP services and it worked just fine. They eventually shut that down for $GOOGLE_REASONS.
Companies aggressively going after open source 3rd party clients caused interoperability to suffer greatly. Mandating open standards can help mitigate the most user-unfriendly parts, which often turns out to be the "business model".
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It can be a little bit of both.
For what it's worth, for a time Google Chat federated other XMPP services and it worked just fine. They eventually shut that down for $GOOGLE_REASONS.
Companies aggressively going after open source 3rd party clients caused interoperability to suffer greatly. Mandating open standards can help mitigate the most user-unfriendly parts, which often turns out to be the "business model".