What kind of "differentiation" are they thinking of? I would pay good money to not have to deal with any (more) proprietary chat systems. They're all annoying. "Download the app" and "Register here" are just synonyms for "Back" and "Mark as spam".
There's a couple tech giants whose chat systems I use, only because I've got friends and colleagues who use them. Unless your new chat system will get me a job, or is the only way 1/3 of my friends will send messages online, I'm not going to touch it.
I don't understand how we ended up with so many incompatible chat systems today. Did we learn nothing from SMTP? Is XMPP not good enough? Are we so petty that compatible communications are somehow an anathema?
- Signal end-to-end encryption
- Discord game integration
- Slack history keeping
- Skype ability to make phone calls
- Snapchat self destroying pictures
You may not see any use in any of these but some people do.
And some reasons why these aren't standardized:
- it is hard to do without some form of centralization (ex: history keeping)
- some services cost money (ex: phone calls)
- some goals are contradictory (ex: end-to-end encryption and searchable histories)
- owning a popular messaging network is simply too appealing
I still don't buy that. If you do search client-side, then history should be trivially searchable even under E2E encryption.
