I wish I could get people on XMPP, but I just accepted that, to communicate with my family, I need to use iMessage. I've had businesses try to get us to use their closed source communication thing and it just didn't work. Logging on to their weird thing every week or so to communicate with them and having to do any transactional communication manually just isn't really that great.

As far as XMPP for business, there are still things I really appreciate about email - threading/subjects to isolate different interactions being one. I would still love to be able to have it as a tool for bvb comms. Email is a very nice archival tool for both correspondence and documents. It's one of the few things in my life that is mostly organized and gives me easy access to things I need. Recently someone from a government agency said "you never sent x document" and I was able to go back in my email and say "yes I did on this date, I will send it to you again".