Most contacts can't set up their own jabber server, nor find the service you are using. So while I would love to be able to follow your advice, I would just look like a d*** to friends/business associates.

People don't even get it when I tell them some times that I don't use $service because of lock-in. They look at me weirdly. For most people it's a given that for every network you can communicate only with that network, and google supporting XMPP didn't help that situation. For 99% of people gtalk users could only talk with gtalk users.

Now one could go down the road and explain the situation and say "imagine if you could only send email to @yourservice.com addresses, and you needed one of each service to communicate" but people wouldn't care. And in the end I don't blame them. They use technology to make their lives easier, it's unreasonable to expect them to research anything more than what phone they will buy, let alone find out how open are the standards $service uses. Even I before Google dropped XMPP federation didn't know what federation is or that Google supported it, just as most of the people don't know that Knorr/Maggi Stock Cubes augment the food's taste by being 90+% mono-sodium glutamate and use them daily when preparing "healthy", "homemade" food.

I don't know what's the solution to this problem, but I am pretty sure that "educating" the users is not it.