Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Has nothing to do with that. Put yourself in the shoes of the people behind a new messaging platform that needs a competitive advantage. Using XMPP is a massive technical restriction, and would give almost no benefits (Discord gets to be opinionated on how servers and channels are organized).

Discord's product isn't a hosting service, their product is the quality of the service as well. This quality would be impossible with XMPP as it exists today, within the constraints of a startup. Remember, they do voice and they want to do video as well. Google's own efforts on Jingle failed due to performance.

As for mobile, it's not just power consumption, it's connection lifecycle. XMPP last I heard had extremely poor support for lossy connectivity.



Has nothing to do with what?

Again, power consumption/connection lifecycle isn't directly a competitive advantage because your user doesn't care so long as it works. (Slack and FB Messenger seem to have terrible power consumption and connection lifecycles for mobile but also seem to be doing just fine.)

(Not to mention those are also things that could be fixed in an open standard, if people cared to contribute that effort. The unfortunate reality is that isn't a competitive advantage either.)

The competitive advantage is to find excuses to dismiss open standards, whether the arguments are technically or factually correct is another matter, and build walled gardens.

But more crucially to my previous point, being technically superior isn't really a competitive advantage if a user doesn't notice it and in fact, can slow one from getting first mover advantage by shipping something/anything faster and sooner. I really don't think that on a power consumption or connection lifecycle standpoint any of the closed source protocols are really all that much better, and we have mostly nothing but anecdotes to trade on that question because the companies want to maintain their secret sauces.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: