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Re:Ray Tomlinson, Inventor of Email, Has Died by userbinator on Sunday March 06, 2016 @02:05PM (#11235016)
There is IRC, which still has a reasonable number of users but isn't "global" in the way email is, SIP which could be used for IM but often wasn't, and Microsoft even attempted(but failed) to standardise MSN Messenger's protocol:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-movva-msn-messenger-protoc...

Re:Ray Tomlinson, Inventor of Email, Has Died by shmerl on Sunday March 06, 2016 @02:08PM (#11235031)
XMPP came closest to offering something serious enough. But most turned their backs on it and didn't propose anything better either.
Re:Ray Tomlinson, Inventor of Email, Has Died by voltagex_ on Monday March 07, 2016 @12:27AM (#11237293)
It's not that people intentionally turned their backs on it (Facebook and Google did, for combined business and technical reasons). It's that people will use whatever's easiest to use at the time, with a heavy bias to going where their friends are, whether that's iMessage (with the associated hardware cost), Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp or even IRC.