I get it the numbers are irrelevant, but just wanted to share where those came from.
http://www.process-one.net/en/imtrends/article/usage_estimat... - "that study relies on a panel of 7292 XMPP domains as discovered by the IMtrends engine"
So, I'd guess, if there's was least 7k public servers in 2008, it won't be wrong to say "thousands."
http://xmpp.org/xsf/press/2003-09-22.shtml - this one is old, much before the popularity peak, when XMPP was still called Jabber, and yet: "the JSF's estimate includes more than 4 million paying customers of Jabber, Inc.'s commercial software as well as an estimated 6 million users of open source and other commercial implementations of the Jabber/XMPP protocol"
So, I guess, "millions" isn't a wrong estimate, too.
I don't think that removing XMPP was evil/inappropriate, but I don't think MNG is really comparable, since Mozilla (really, Vlad Vukićević) went to a lot of effort to design, implement, and submit APNG for standardization as a simpler replacement. (Sadly, the PNG group didn't bite, and neither did anyone else, but there was a good faith effort.)
I'm surprised to hear a number that high, but regardless of what the number actually is, it certainly sucked for those people.
But remember the context: Google was looking to expand Talk into Hangouts, and XMPP would have needed a makeover to support that product evolution. If Google had extended XMPP unilaterally, they would have been accused of "embrace, extend, extinguish." Without other major players to co-design with, it didn't make a lot of sense to try pursuing a next-generation standard.
> Or one has to be a single entity as large as MSN or AIM to be considered worthy to enjoy openness?
That's kind of inflammatory.
Remember when Mozilla removed MNG support from Firefox despite having 700 votes on the bug? Remember when the Mozilla CEO responded to a status update on the bug by saying "stop adding new noxious gas to this bloated corpse of a bug"? Are those 700 people not "considered worthy to enjoy openness" either? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18574
Organizations have to make trade-offs sometimes, and you can't please everybody all the time.