know | Future

If you felt a disturbance on the web this morning it is because there are big powers on the move. In a first step to eliminating the need to have multiple IM clients running just to keep up with your friends, MSN and Yahoo have announced yesterday that they will make their IM networks interoperable. Now this is a reversal of their previous (now musty old) deal to interoperate with AOL but MSN clains AOL was “difficult to deal with”. No surprises there though, when you are number one on your own you have little incentive to merge with number two. The biggest winner in all this though will be Google. Now AOL has to play ball with Google, Google needs AOL because they carry about a third of Google’s advertising traffic and Google’s IM is an afterthought and should be dumped in favor of AIM. Though today Time Warner is denying that there is a deal afoot, I still think that where there is smoke there is bound to be fire.

Microsoft also stands to gain from this deal in the IT corporate side. Microsoft’s corporate IM services have never really taken off in a big way because they did not interoperate with the free services such as Yahoo and AOL. Now they will, at least with Yahoo and perhaps down the line Google/AOL. If Google buys AOL, or a stake in AOL or just the IM business for that matter, there will be pressure for Google to follow their corporate philosophy and do the non-evil thing, which would be allow interoperation with MSN/Yahoo.

My recommendation to my IT readers is that you get ahead of this curve and if you are a Microsoft Exchange shop, check out the Microsoft Live Communication Server, otherwise, check out Jabber.