Cow’s Blog

October 12th, 2005

Via InsideMicrosoft, Internet Week reports:

Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. are expected to announce Wednesday
interoperability between each other’s instant messaging service, a move
that could dramatically change a market that’s been dominated by
America Online Inc., a newspaper reported.

Microsoft and Yahoo are expected to allow subscribers to chat across
each other’s services and to make computer-to-computer voice calls, the
Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

At the moment, AIM (AOL Instant Messenger (and don’t
complain I didn’t use the acronym tag)) has 41.6 million users. MSN
Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger have 14.1 million and 19.1 million
respectively. I don’t think anyone really knows how many users Jabber
has but they claim to be larger than ICQ. ICQ is linked to AOL Instant
Messenger so can be considered part of it considering almost nobody
uses it.

Google Talk hasn’t really taken off. It probably had quite a few
downloads for several days and many people I know downloaded it but
it’s now barely used. It’s based on the Jabber protocol but so what,
you can’t even talk to other Jabber networks let alone other IM
networks. Sure, Google probably wanted to build an open IM network but
at the moment it’s just as closed as the others. Jabber just saved them
from having to invent a new protocol.

If Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger merge, that’ll be great news.
For a start when Microsoft’s Messenger servers go down, the Yahoo ones
will still be up. Secondly, Yahoo! Messenger is a really nice IM client
(built in Launchcast is great). To be able to migrate to Yahoo! and
still to be able to talk to all my contacts would be fantastic. Clients
such as Trillian and Gaim don’t really cut it because what I want is
Launchcast - not the protocol.

There was also discussion several weeks ago on MSN and AOL perhaps
merging. If this went ahead, it is likely the MSN Messenger network
would also interop with AIM and ICQ. With AIM, MSN, ICQ and Yahoo all
working in harmony, we have a single global IM network. Jabber
currently interops with the four networks to a certain extent too,
using transports.

Perfect way of killing Skype and Google Talk. Or perhaps the Google
guys never really wanted to build a whole instant messaging service,
they just wanted to get the other guys to work together a bit more and
do some common good

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