There’s just something fucking hilarious about laying off employees, mocking them, and being sued for improperly firing them – and then whining that your competitor hired them and that they have access to Twitter information still.
I believe this fits well under the “fuck around and find out” doctrine.
First of all, SMTP was much more well-established before Google came along than XMPP was.
Second, from what I’ve heard, Gmail (and other big players like Hotmail etc.) did have a substantial detrimental effect on the proverbial “little guy’s” ability to self-host email… at least if he wants outbound messages to actually be delivered instead of blocked, anyway.