The unkept vow involves the company’s stated intent to make its wildly popular AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) software work with other instant-messaging programs. AOL has about 150 million registered users of its program. The company boasts more than 2 billion instant messages (IMs) sent daily. Yet AOL users can’t zip off their how-de-dos to those using Microsoft’s MSN Messenger or Yahoo Messenger, or even ICQ, AOL’s less ubiquitous, “edgy” IM service. Can you imagine a telephone system where you can’t call your mother because she’s on AT&T and you’re on Sprint?
This untenable situation has persisted for years, and it’s only going to become more annoying as instant messaging migrates beyond the desktop and into the phone and other devices like televisions and automobiles. (There’s already the makings of a boom in corporate instant messaging, with about 12 million office users a month shooting quips and lunch invitations to each other.)
The solution is obvious: get all the players to figure out a way to attain the holy grail of interoperability, so that everyone can say “hey” to everyone else. A few years ago it looked like this was going to happen. A group of IM providers–just about everybody but AOL, in fact–took their case to the government and media and began to make some headway. The head of this “IM Unified” group testified before the FCC with a nifty sound bite: “Mr. Case,” he said, referring to AOL’s chairman, “tear down the wall!”
Case, at the time trying to woo regulators into blessing his deal with Time Warner, promised to do just that. The FCC made interoperability a condition of the merger, though it based compliance on a vague standard involving videoconferencing. But as the months turned into years–an eternity in Internet time–AOL’s excuses (mostly concerning alleged security problems) wore thin. “They never had any intention of opening up, and never made any meaningful steps towards adopting a standard,” says Microsoft’s Bob Visse. And now AOL isn’t even bothering to fake it. This summer, its progress report to the FCC basically concluded that interoperability was a long way off, and the best the world’s biggest Internet company could do was license AIM to other companies like Apple to make their own “client” versions of its system. This scheme, of course, locks even more people into AOL’s membership roles and forces more customers to route their communications through AOL’s system.
Ted Leonsis, AOL’s vice chairman, put it to me this way late last summer: “[Interoperability] wasn’t something our customers were asking for.” But Leonsis also spoke of a revitalized AOL whose actions were no longer “defensive.” So why not open up IM to everybody, and compete solely on quality and creativity? History shows that such an act might be beneficial: at one time, AOL allowed members to e-mail only one another. When the company finally adopted the Internet e-mail standard, the service didn’t miss a beat–and probably would have died if it hadn’t made the move. When I brought the matter up with AOL VP David Gang, though, he drew a dark picture of interoperability, warning that if a standard were hastily reached, users might be subjected to a plague of instant spam. But surely people could easily fight junk messages by accepting messages only from people on their Buddy Lists.
Here’s drearier news. Not only is AOL hoping that the regulatory matter is buried, but its biggest competitors (who now have captive audiences of their own) don’t seem as hungry for interoperability as they used to. Oh, they give lip service to the principle. But if Microsoft and Yahoo really wanted it so much, wouldn’t they have arranged it so that their own systems deigned to work with each other? Right now the only agitation on this issue seems to be coming from financial institutions begging big IM players to avoid the train wreck that will come when Merrill Lynch’s system won’t work with Chase’s. This bunch’s implicit threat is that it will migrate to companies that provide workaround solutions, offered by companies like Trillian or Jabber. But AOL has traditionally worked to block such technology.
Microsoft’s Visse claims that the lack of interoperability actually helps competition. “During this battle for share, you see companies innovating, and the best product will win,” he says. (Guess which one he’s thinking of.) But how can any system attain greatness if it doesn’t let you speak to all your friends, family and associates? Microsoft isn’t playing hardball, and the FCC seems to have lost interest. So I guess it’s up to me to say it: American Online… tear down the walls.
