It&#x27;s, ironically, a case of the &quot;embrace and extinguish&quot; philosophy that Microsoft was reviled for.<p>I remember reading posts by several people which said they weren&#x27;t going to build a RSS reader because they didn&#x27;t want to compete with Google Reader.. and then they went ahead and killed it.<p>RSS didn&#x27;t really &quot;take off&quot; with mainstream users (I guess today&#x27;s equivalent is Twitter), but it filled an interesting niche.<p>RSS -&gt; Twitter<p>Usenet -&gt; many proprietary platforms<p>IRC -&gt; Slack<p>XMPP never took off<p>Many open, interoperable services died off or never took off, but companies built similar services and are enjoying success.