THIS IS WHY I HATE MICROSOFT AND ITS CRONIES

These crazy-ass people seemingly have a FOSS-o-phobia, so much so that everytime the open-source community finds a way to make open-source software interoperable with MS products, Microsoft finds a way to break that in the next version, by making everything propriatory! This is like you are sure you wont make money by playing fair, so you resort to crippling your competition by any which way possible. LOSERS!

The Pidgin-SIPE developers had made Office Communicator interoperable with other platforms that ran Pidgin. Life was beautiful, with me developing in Linux, and still being able to stay accessible via Pidgin-Sipe on OCS and Exchange mail in Thunderbird.
Now, with Microsoft Lync 2010, Pidgin no longer works, for, to quote the MS support staff - "3rd party clients will not connect to Lync Online regardless of the settings you may try, because they do not contain the necessary proprietary coding"!! Why can't communication protocols be standardized? I wish someone finds a way to sue them big time, either in the US or in the EU, for such monopolistic practices and for stifling standardization and competition.

Check this thread on the Office 365 forum -
http://community.office365.com/en-us/f/166/t/6903.aspx
The reaction of one user - TummyStixxx - tells the whole story.

What frustrates me even more are these douche-bags who manage IT infrastructure. Why can't they find and deploy a technology that's vendor-agnostic and standards-compliant? When you are deploying something at the organizational level, you should find something which is standards compliant and works across all major platforms - LINUX INCLUDED!

Now that Lync has been deployed wef today, after trying to figure out why pidgin stopped logging into communicator, I suddenly realize that it's thanks to Lync - that there is no way I can have an office intranet communicator on my linux workstation! Awesome, isn't it!! THIS IS WHY I FUCKING HATE MICROSOFT!

Boy, in future, I want to work for a techie-centric company which respects Linux and open technologies and makes sure that technologies deployed in the organization are standards compliant and work across all platforms. I hate being at the receiving end everytime, just because I use an efficient devleoper's OS, and because some dumb-ass admin thinks that that OS is not important. Pissed off beyond all repairs.