Heresy! Techcrunch has taught us well that the only way for a new service/protocol/whatever to be born is by tearing its way free out the entrails of another, more mature, not-as-hot-right-now protocol.

Sorry for the imagery, I just thought it fit with the D&D theme :)

Some different protocols do different things. But XMPP, particularly wrapped in the Wave implementation, can do many, many things.

Wave might catch on as little more than an open-source alternative to, say, Sharepoint and Biztalk. (collaboration and workflow automation being the most obvious non-communication uses).

But I don't see why people would stop short and not replace their SMTP/Jabber/IRC/RSS use with Wave once they and everyone they need to work with is using it.

merging Skype and mail sounds good though. If Skype put out a mail client, I'd probably use it.