This is the best summary I could come up with:

Chat is a core part of the modern internet experience, which is why everyone wants a piece: if you can build the app in which people talk to their friends, you’ve built the stickiest thing in tech.

Fifteen years ago, there were lots of competing platforms — MSN, Yahoo, AIM, and others — but you could use an app like Pidgin or Jabber to bring them all together.

The systems weren’t completely interoperable the way email is, but it didn’t really matter; you could just talk to your friends without worrying about what platform they used.

The underlying peer-to-peer tech that made them work simply didn’t make sense on mobile devices.

People buy iPhones to be blue bubbles; users check Snapchat a hundred times a day because that’s where their friends are.

“If you look at every computing platform, the killer app has always been chat.” He’s mad that he has smart speakers all over his house that can’t send a text message.

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