In Sendmail's defence, I suppose there are tons and tons of books on the
subject, which simply isn't the case for Jabberd. However, how much longer
has Sendmail had to accumulate these books? Did it have this many books in
its opening years?
Likely not, but one could also make the argument that at the time, Sendmail was the only game in town. qmail, Postfix, Exim and whatnot have been around for a while now, but I believe all of them arose in the 1990's. Sendmail had more than a decade of being pretty much The E-mail Server, so far as I can tell. (Granted, it's 3am and I'm too tired to go check for certain on dates.) qmail, Exim and Postfix all tried to provide something other than Sendmail did, something to make them stand out.
By contrast, Jabber is not 'the only game in town' when it comes to instant messaging. In fact, if it's trying to become a popular end-user IM solution, instead of just a corporate solution (where, yes, it is in a much smaller playing field), then it is actually struggling against several very-entrenched players. Each of the Sendmail alternatives offered something to the target audience (system administrators): better performance, less security holes, modular design, etc.
In order to overtake the existing networks in terms of end-user usage, Jabber needs something to 'win out' over them which the target audience -- IM end-users -- will understand. Pubsub, for instance, is a really cool technology, but it won't convince my father to switch off of MSN. x-data is a useful way to capture user input information, but the average end-user won't see it necessarily as being all that different as when AIM or MSN redirect you to a webpage for a survey or something. Sadly, the thing which makes Jabber stand out the most to the average end-user is the transports... which should not be Jabber's selling point. Worse still, after they try to use the transports and find they can't file-transfer with their friends on the legacy networks, can't see buddy icons, or any of the other things they're used to, they usually forget about Jabber and go instead to Gaim or Trillian or any of the other combined messengers.
While you can maybe apply the example of Postfix or qmail trying to encroach on Sendmail's territory, the example I usually see people using for Jabber is Apache. The Apache example being used for Jabber/XMPP is a bad one; I'd say that the JSF bears less resemblance to the Apache Software Foundation, and more to the W3C.
The ASF builds a software platform, which others have built on top of, as well as standards (like apxs) relating to that platform. The W3C defines, instead, a collection of protocols and markup languages, and while they /do/ technically have a reference implementation (Amaya), this reference implementation is not, in my experience, a product which anyone actually uses.
If the JSF is in the role of the W3C, the problem might well be that we need an ASF for our W3C... an active, large developer project which implements the defined standards in a clean and usable way. After all, one could argue that the W3C's standards would not have been as well-adopted as they are without the Apache Software Foundation to push them forward in a usable platform.
-- Rachel 'Sparks' Blackman -- sysadmin, developer, mad scientist "If it is not broken, give me five minutes to redesign it!"
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