Interoperability Memes

Every tech lead's nightmare captured in three panels. You've got 14 competing standards, someone gets the brilliant idea to unify them all, and boom—now you've got 15 standards to maintain. It's like trying to fix JavaScript by inventing TypeScript, or fixing build tools by creating yet another bundler. The examples listed (Matrix, XMPP, IRC) hit different. These are actual messaging protocols that were supposed to replace each other but instead just... coexist in eternal purgatory. IRC from the 90s? Still kicking. XMPP was gonna save us all? Nope, now we have Slack, Discord, Teams, and 47 other chat apps. The real kicker is that recursive comic within the comic—because even the solution to explaining this problem becomes part of the problem. Meta as hell, and painfully accurate.