AOL members to instant message MSN? AOL members to instant message MSN? Wednesday, June 4, 2003 Posted: 4:34 PM EDT (2034 GMT) NEW YORK (Reuters) -- If AOL Time Warner and rival Microsoft agree to collaborate, instant messaging services could see a boom -- especially within businesses, analysts say. As part of last week's broad anti-trust litigation settlement, the two rivals agreed to discuss making their messaging systems work together. The talks would come after a long, bitter fight to make AOL open its system to instant messengers using competing services, such as Microsoft's MSN. AOL is home to the majority of those who use instant messaging, which enables real-time chats online, and is the leading player in the arena. Urging AOL to open up Its rivals, including Microsoft's MSN and Yahoo, have been clamoring for AOL to open up its system so their users can communicate with those using AOL services ICQ and AIM. But AOL's efforts to let rivals' users communicate with those using its services has stalled and the company has cited security issues and market conditions among other issues. "It's a major milestone in the sense that it has gotten AOL and Microsoft on the same stage, both saying interoperability is a good idea and something they are both going to make happen," said Michael Gartenberg, a director at Jupiter Research. "But the devil is in the details. What level of interoperability will there be and when will it be implemented?" he added. As part of regulatory approval for America Online's purchase of Time Warner more than three years ago, AOL had pledged to work toward interoperability. CNN's parent company AOL Time Warner agreed to settle an anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft. The agreement included a $750 million payout to AOL and plans for collaboration on digital media, in addition to the talks about how to connect instant messaging services. Expanding the market Analysts said that instant messaging, which grew in popularity first among millions of teenagers, could see a big boost in the corporate market if the systems were opened up. "Interoperability has the opportunity to grow the market across the board, especially in enterprise," Gartenberg said. IDC Research Manager Robert Mahowald said dominance in the consumer market now has to be transferred to the business market, which holds the potential for more revenue. Working with Microsoft would give AOL a greater push into the instant messaging market for businesses, which it, MSN and Yahoo have been making strides in recently, analysts said. Working with rivals Microsoft's recent plans to ship its new real-time communications (RTC) product as an adjunct to its Windows Server 2003 may have caused AOL to consider working with its archrival, said IDC's Robert Mahowald, research manager at IDC. "They just announced that people who are users of Microsoft Exchange will get RTC for free so that means 70 million users worldwide could have it on their desktop," Mahowald said. "It means a potentially huge Microsoft presence on business desktops. AOL is saying even though they are veterans in the consumer market, in the business market they are the new guys and Microsoft has a lot of enterprise software," he added. http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/06/04/instant.messaging.reut/
