What year is it? 2016. This is not 2000, or even 2008. The reality is that people often have to talk to client, vendors, professional contacts, etc. This forces them to use a client like Pidgin, or an other multi-protocol IM client, so they can IM to everyone they need to. Even in some very large organizations various groups can be on different IM services. At my work we have deployed Cisco Jabber, and it doesn't appear to work very well with 3rd party clients. Contacts are missing, or cannot tell who is on or off line. It's a complete mess, unless the user is using the Cisco Supplies client, but this means that a the user has to also run Pidgin as well to talk to all those other people in the world. Running 2 IM clients is not exact a perfect solution, and in my opinion is extremely burdensome on the user, but it's a good patch until something can be worked out. However there is the matter of all the users that run Linux, Ubuntu or Debian. Those people cannot use the Cisco Jabber client. I understand that 15 years ago Linux was ignoble on the desktop, but as of about 10 years ago it wasn't. Linux is born of the same openness that ushered in TCP/IP, which is what brought Cisco into assistance, and now they're chat client which uses open standards, and mostly likely some opensource software, doesn't work with Linux. This is hardly something that would be expected from an industry leader.
What can we, the humble users, do to convince Cisco that not supporting Linux is like cutting off your nose to spite your face?
