Microsoft and Yahoo have announced that their Instant Messenger products will now work together, uniting 350 million user accounts around the world. AOL and Google are also in discussions about making their IMs work together.
I was a speaker at InstantMessagingPlanet conferences in 2001, 2002, and 2003. I was working at Groove Networks at the time and I remember predicting in 2001 that it would take 5 years for the IM players to work together. There were other IM companies who predicted it would be done in 9 months. Email clients from various companies work together, why can't IM clients work together seamlessly? It was not a technology problem, it was all about the business model.
IM is a free service to consumers. The business model was all about building a huge loyal audience (walled garden) and monetizing it through ads or cross promotion with other products. AOL was the top dog, by far, and had no interest in sharing their audience with Yahoo or Microsoft. AOL believed that if their IM users could freely interact with other IM users, they would lose their leading position and it wouldn't matter which IM client was used. Hmmm...where have I heard that argument before :-)
Microsoft, Yahoo, Trillian, and others reverse engineered the AOL protocol to make their IM clients to interoperate with the AOL AIM. AOL would then change the protocol slightly to break the other IM clients interop plan. It was a game of cat and mouse that eventually lost its appeal.
Microsoft and Yahoo over the past 5 years have built up huge user communities that together exceed AOL's community. Now AOL is at a disadvantage, and they are talking about making all of AOL services free. AOL is in a difficult position. Their monthly dial up subscription business, a huge cash cow, has been dwindling for years as people move to broadband. They are faced with the classic Innovators Dilemma. Do they try to preserve their cash cow to the bitter end, or do they make the switch to ad supported services? This move by Yahoo and Microsoft has turned up the heat even further.
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So, Don, as the now top dogs in the IM-osphere, when should we expect Microsoft and Yahoo to announce that AOL has been invited to join the federation?
Posted by: Alec Saunders | July 13, 2006 at 12:37 PM
AOL has already been invited to participate. They declined, perhaps hoping this interop effort would fail.
IM interoperability standards? Microsoft supports SIP/SIMPLE. Others support SIP as well. As I have said, this isn't a technology problem. There are standards, and the federation problem has several solutions. It is all about the business motivations of the major players. It took 5 years for Microsoft and Yahoo to come to the conclusion that they were better off working together. It probably took only 5 months to actually make the technology work.
Posted by: Don Dodge | July 13, 2006 at 12:56 PM
Thanks for the background Don. I rather suspected that AOL might be conflicted on this. What then, should any other provider of SIP/Simple clients do to be able to interoperate with MSN? Say, for instance, if Earthlink wanted to?
Posted by: Alec Saunders | July 13, 2006 at 05:31 PM
Blake Irving is in charge at Microsoft and Brad Garlinghouse is the contact at Yahoo. Earthlink, or any other IM company should contact them for details.
Posted by: Don Dodge | July 13, 2006 at 09:08 PM
You may have predicated it would take 5 years for them to work together, but the landscape is very different today mostly I think because of Skype.
Skype is my lousy but very cheap global phone. Chat and particularly group chat are integrated beautifully.
Google's talk and jabber also seem to be significant forces on the landscape.
AOL has partnered with Apple (iChat) and Apple is probably at the front of the game in people causally video conferencing.
I would love to see the numbers, but I imagine the true data is closely guarded by each service provider.
They should make all text chat interoperate and move on. Get focused on voice and video, and the social web.
Posted by: Lloyd D Budd | July 15, 2006 at 04:36 PM
so how do i get the new yahoo/msn messenger?
Posted by: jennifer | July 24, 2006 at 08:48 PM
Jennifer, It is the same MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger client that you probably already have. The new thing is that Microsoft and Yahoo allowed their servers to talk to each other.
So, if you have MSN Messenger and your friend has Yahoo Messenger, you can see that your Yahoo friend is online and send an IM to her from MSN Messenger. Believe it or not, this is an important technical and business achievement. It took more than 5 years to get to this point.
Posted by: Don Dodge | July 26, 2006 at 06:55 PM