TechContrarian

There’s quite a lot of discussion lately about Microsoft and Yahoo getting their instant messaging clients to inter-operate in a way that is native to the code put forth by the vendors. As apposed to some sort of hack solution, such as what other IM clients do so that one client logs into multiple systems; attempting to eliminate the need for multiple clients.

Now, this news is extremely significant in that it marks a new trend and new beginning to communicating to a wider audience without worrying which network one of our contacts are using. All IM communities have been waiting patiently for this.

Let’s explore the “why now” question. In my mind, two significant events occurred within the instant messaging community all brought forth by one significant market force, Google. One of these significant events was their technology offering which ironically seemed overly simple and under-featured. The technology is called Google Talk beta. The other event was Google’s partnership with AOL. The partnership with AOL is significant in that AOL has a unique market position, in which the company has not developed to increase their revenue stream. Both AOL and financial analysts understand a partnership with the king of Internet advertising should bring some interesting long term results.

According to ComScore Media Metrix, nearly 70 million Americans use instant messaging applications every month and AOL controls more than 50% of the American chat market. Imagine having a conversation and a context aware advertisement streams across the window while you having a discussion. Imagine an unobtrusive advertisement like a hypertext link to a web site related to your conversation. Seems useful enough to me but this can bring in huge revenue. Google and AOL seem to make a good partnership. Google has the technology and the vision, while AOL has the market and is run by business folk with an long history of advertising expertise.

So, combining the IM communities of both Yahoo! and Microsoft gives the two tag team rivalries a similar sized market. Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google have expertise in both instant messaging and web advertising technologies so they can work together towards inter-operating between the two dissimilar clients that work over different back-end technologies which communicate using incompatible proprietary protocols.

Google on the other hand embraced open standards and opened their IM infrastructure to all third parties. Given Google’s openness, third party support, and partnership with AOL it was only a matter of time before the big three IM giants started to partner up. And it’s about time, thanks to Google and a desire for revenue growth.