During a bit of a rant about the recent PyCon, Bruce Eckel makes the following observation:
I think a lot of people have been caught up in the idea that we need to commercialize Python, and ride some kind of wave of publicity the way that Java and C# and Rails seem to have done. This kind of thinking leads to bad, impulsive decisions that can have long-lasting or even permanent negative impacts on the community. Maybe things don't seem to be happening fast enough in comparison with those commercial endeavors, but this is a grass-roots movement. It's never been about moving as fast as you can. It's always been about vision, not tactics. For many, it's fun and exciting and really important to "catch the wave," but the wave passes and then you've just exhausted yourself chasing a brief bump in the water. Python may not have caught any particular wave, but it's always grown, steadily.
His wise words capture much of my attitude toward Jabber/XMPP technologies. No, we have never been the hot thing, but we have grown organically since our beginnings in 1999 through persistent effort and continuous improvement. It's not exciting, but it sure is effective.