Not particularly fair. You also had XDR (ubiquitous on Unix systems), IIOP, TLV, ICE... not to mention what ever protocol designer for the past 20 years has used: network byte order integers and ASCII/UTF8 strings.

Some people just like ASCII, human readable protocols. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's a little silly to suggest that the options for a packed binary encoding in 2007 were limited because Thrift and Protocol Buffers were too new.