Why AOL Should Not Block Trillian
from the here's-one-reason dept
Last week and over the weekend, someone tried to tell me exactly how stupid I was for even suggesting that it might be in AOL's best business interest to not block Trillian users from accessing AIM. The question of my intelligence has not yet been settled, but at the very least, I am not the only one who believes AOL is making a business mistake. Here's a good column explaining just one reason why AOL might be making a mistake in shutting out Trillian users or other 3rd party IM clients. The argument is that they're shutting out business users - who could represent a big potential revenue source in the future from IM and collaboration systems.
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MSN on October 15th, 2003
Add to the above, the fact that people who do not renew their Trillian subscriptions will end up paying less for the same product over the long run, than those who do keep paying to renew their subscriptions/memberships and you can see how Trillian's pay scale works against it... And speaking of working against itself... Trillian boasts over 11 million downloads and Microsoft is considering third party IM clients individually and is assessing it's likely user base as a defining criteria... The more Trillian users there are the more it may cost Trillian's developers to maintain the ability to connect to MSN and ironically the more likey it will be that Cerulean Studios may find it necessary to decline to accept Microsofts terms and conditions for the right to connect and that could leave its users out in the cold...
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