Shocked at ‘inspiration’ on MSN Beta 9 from Lotus Sametime

 

 

MSN tray icon similar to Lotus Sametime

When I upgraded to Microsoft’s Live Messenger 9 Beta 3 last week, I was intrigued to see the resemblence between the status icons in the system tray from Sametime and Live Messenger 9.  Notice on the image capture above –how the green bar is similar?  Away sign is same as well. Interesting? 

Does this mean that there is a universal IM standard coming soon from the big players or just that Live Messenger is being targeted at Enterprise customers as well (along with Microsoft’s Corp Messenger offering) –since Sametime rocks the Enterprise messaging sector. Or just that they are copying whats good?

Thoughts? Is new Jabber platform going to implement these standards on the UI front?