Who said targeting tech people is a good idea? Did tech people were the ones that choose which closed IM system they use? Compare targeting tech people with Mozilla or Linux distributions before Ubuntu appeared and targeting Aunt Tillies with Firefox, Ubuntu-like distributions or Eee PC with Linux on it. Which strategy is the most successful in all these examples: targeting tech people or targeting Aunt Tillies? Conclusion: tech people (WE!) do NOT matter when network effects are involved, Aunt Tillies are numerous and thus do matter.
Why put up artificial barriers? What's wrong with things like filetransfer working both ways? If you have already implemented sending files to msn users then its trivial to implement receiving of files too. Doing half of a job only serves to make XMPP look bad in peoples eyes.
Richard
