The Big Three IM Providers Budge... Just A Little
from the they-still-don't-get-it... dept
IM interoperability is always a popular topic, but for years, absolutely nothing has happened on this front. It's been five years since Microsoft first launched MSN Messenger that included the ability to interact with AOL Instant Messenger, and AOL promptly blocked it starting the continuing battle for stupid IM interconnect policies. Just this past weekend, I had dinner with a friend who works on one of the big three messenger products, and we had a long discussion about this. After tossing out all the reasons why his company feels the need to keep up the garden walls on IM, he finally admitted that interoperability is the number one request they get from users -- and agreed that it had to happen at some point. However, he cautioned that for interop to really work, all of the major players have to agree, and that's not easy. In the early days, it was only AOL that didn't want interop, and that was because they dominated the market. Now, it's pretty much a three horse race, and all three players are hesitant to do too much interconnecting. However, that may be changing ever so slightly. Following last months' dual announcements that AOL and Yahoo were both getting out of the enterprise IM business (as if people in companies don't already use both products for work related IMs) AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft, in a stunning show of cooperation, have agreed to let all three IM products work with Microsoft's enterprise IM server. This is, as mentioned, a tiny step. First, since Yahoo and AOL no longer compete in the space, they're not really losing much. Second, this is only for users of the enterprise IM server, which is a pretty small group of folks. Still, it does suggest that the different IM groups have at least thought about ways to move toward interoperability, even if it's unlikely to happen in any of our lifetimes. How difficult is it for any of these folks to realize that the more open they are, the more adoption they'll get?
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Makes sense
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Re: Makes sense
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No Subject Given
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switch to jabber
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Your splitting hairs with the above poster.
Trillian STILL solved the problem way before the Big 3 did AND each time one of the Big 3 have attempted to block Trillian, they have come through with flying colors on a patch.
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