MSN, AOL & Yahoo have formed a partnership to combine their IM networks. But only if you are a business user and you buy some MS software.
To use the new system, companies will have to license new Microsoft network software that will serve as the hub connecting messaging systems operated separately by AOL, Microsoft's MSN division and Yahoo.
This also brings new functionality to IM. (well, new for these guys)
The new service being touted by Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo would have features, including the electronic recording and saving of instant messages, and the guarantee of secure communications, that the free instant messaging services do not include. The ability to store and retrieve instant messages is critical for businesses placing orders with suppliers, brokerage firms confirming stock purchases to investors and in numerous other commercial transactions and communications.
This news follows the recent news that yahoo and aol are no longer offering IM software to businesses. Is this the first step in the netscape-itization of YIM & AIM?
"This lays the groundwork for instant messaging to become as widespread and useful as e-mail is today," said Taylor Collyer, senior director of real-time collaboration marketing at Microsoft. "If you can connect to everybody, it becomes more valuable. I believe this announcement will lead to that happening with instant messaging."
Is Taylor Collyer a pseudonym for Stowe Boyd?
1. Wouldn't it be nice if businesses would finally get behind Jabber (http://www.jabber.org)? I think an influx of users would push it's development and documentation to a more mature state. As for chatting person to person, or person to group it works great as is. Do businesses really need stock tickers, ad banners, and webcam support first, or do they need an open standard to chat, under which they can control their namespace? I think the answer is obvious.
Can you imagine if everybody that wanted to use email had to pay a licensing fee to MS in order to interoperate? That's just ridiculous. We must get off this path as quickly as possible, it's getting tired. How many enterprise IM model shifts do we have to endure from the big guys before we say "enough"?
I'll finish with an anecdote regarding the "success" of enterprise IM and namespace management. Recently I had the opportunity to test an IM gateway from one of the industry leaders. It could handle logging and policy enforcement for the big boys: Y!, MSN, AOL. It did this well. One of their employees was more than happy to give me his IM contact info, which I'll admit was a nice touch. Upon further inquiry, we discovered the employees had AOL screennames that were independant and made no use of AOL identity services (think, your company holds the rights to employee @ yourdomain.com). Only their MSN names were managed by an identity service. Now, if an industry leader with partnership agreements doesn't manage to put all the big boys services to full use, why should the rest of the corporate world?
Posted at 8:20PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Brendon