It seems that products like AIM, ICQ, Facebook Messenger, Skype, cuseeme, etc. go through this lifecycle of (a) reaching MVP status, (b) stagnation, (c) deterioration and (d) people jumping ship to some other product at stage (a).
The new product seems better than the deteriorated old product but doesn't seem better than I remember the old product being back when it was at stage(a). Why?
For example, Skype hit that very early on - you were able to make and receive voip calls of a very good quality, zeroconf, for free. It really didn’t need anything else. It just did one thing really well. That’s not stagnation.
Whenever I'm calling over 3G/4G it often disconnects, and I'm not the only person who seems to have this issue.
WhatsApp seems to be a lot better for mobile calling
My first "real" job was as an intern on the Yahoo! Messenger team where I worked on both the Windows and Mac versions more than ten years ago.
Back in those days while I had been sad that XMPP never took off, I had accepted that if you wanted to make cool IM client interfaces and get them in front of a lot of real people, you had to work on one of the big popular proprietary ones.
It was an amazing experience working on it. When I went back to school after the internship, I observed people at school who I never met using features I wrote during my internship! How cool is that? Given that experience, I've always had a soft spot for Yahoo! and dreaded the growing inevitability of today's announcement.
In the years since, my passion for IM has been a largely sad one. I promoted Google Talk heavily when it came out due to it being based on XMPP, only to see Google bait and switch us. Then I resigned myself back to proprietary IM hell for a while as getting people to use XMPP seemed increasingly ridiculous as its user experience lagged further and further behind Hangouts, iMessage, etc, etc...
Then eventually the Riot IM client came out and I got excited about IM again. One of many clients built atop the new Matrix protocol which styles itself as a successor to XMPP, Riot was the first IM client I'd ever used that felt like it rivaled the big players in IM in terms of user experience.
While my career has moved on from coding IM clients, I am glad to say I've helped the Matrix/Riot folks a small amount with coding and localization. And most importantly I cheer them on publicly and privately every chance I get.