AOL’s Taking Wrong Direction on IM

Lee Finck

September 12, 2002

AOL Time Warner is quite the distracted behemoth today, with everyone from Ted Turner to the Securities and Exchange Commission hunting for executive scalps. So it is unsurprising that virtually nothing is going on in instant messaging, an area where the company has been completely on the defensive during all its years of undisputed leadership.

The perpetual open-standards stalemate–marked by a self-sustaining whirlpool of repetitive press and rebuttal–has gone on so long now that the instant messaging category has become far less interesting than when it first burst on the scene a few years ago.

Yossi Vardi’s ICQ hit the first and really only grand slam in instant messaging. The poster child for viral marketing, ICQ bagged 5 million users, the distribution channel being the users themselves. During that initial phase, it seemed clear that ICQ would continue to improve and become the de facto instant messaging standard.

Enter AOL with its wispy yet effective AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), spoon-fed to legions of indentured novice subscribers. AOL had the logical notion that it could control the category by snapping up the free-spirited scrappers at Mirabilis (the creator of ICQ), eventually consolidating the two largest instant messaging camps into an unbeatable controlling force.

Meanwhile, Microsoft and others unsuccessfully tried to interoperate with AIM. Several products and companies were hurt in the process, including Tribal Voice, Peoplelink, IChat Messenger, and even Yahoo, though its well-designed instant messaging product today enjoys a loyal user base.

AOL has since kept the ICQ world separate from AIM. I still can’t figure out why they do this. Perhaps it’s out of fear that ICQ’s Birkenstock-shod crowd would bolt at the mere whiff of commercialization.

While this battling over interoperable messaging is being waged, instant messaging products have barely advanced. They look, feel and taste about the same as they did in the beginning. The user interfaces are frozen in time; they don’t work well inside firewalls, and they don’t integrate with other applications well.

Read the complete commentary on ZDnet, and then discuss in our AIM forum.