p2pnet - rss feed: Microsoft, Yahoo, IM deal
p2p news / p2pnet:- Once upon a time, in a world far away, hundreds of people and hundreds of companies competed in an open market to develop useful things for other people.
Nowadays, a tiny handful of immensely rich, immensely powerful organizations, usually based in North America, pretend to compete as they sell virtually the same ‘new’ product, usually based on technology someone else has already invented, over and over again.
At regular intervals, they make alliances to make sure one of their number doesn’t get too far ahead and when they judge the time to be right, they ‘leak’ news of their arrangements to the ever-waiting mainstream media for dissemination to the masses.
Now, “Microsoft and Yahoo Inc. have agreed to make their two instant-messaging programs work together, a partnership that could threaten market leader America Online, people familiar with the situation said,” says the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
“The deal was expected to be announced early Wednesday, these people told The Associated Press. One of them works closely with Microsoft. The other was briefed on the deal. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose details.
“A Yahoo-Microsoft partnership, allowing users of the competing services to exchange messages seamlessly, would give the two companies nearly as many users combined as AOL has in total.”
Microsoft had already, “opened up its corporate online messaging service, which requires a license and offers more features, to AOL and Yahoo,” says Reuters, adding:
“Unlike free messaging services, corporate messaging lets businesses install instant messaging within corporate networks, where conversations can be monitored and saved, much like enterprise e-mail.”
It also points out that users of unified messaging services such as Trillian, “can use a single software program to send and receive instant messages from AOL, MSN, Yahoo and other providers, as long as they have an account with each service”.
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See:-
Seattle Post-Intelligencer - Microsoft, Yahoo reach IM deal, October 12, 2005
Reuters - Microsoft, Yahoo to link instant message services, October 12, 2005
October 12th, 2005 at 8:01 pm
Too bad there is no universal standard for IM services. Then they would only be able to compete based on how people like their features/UI instead of people going to those networks because they have to in order to speak with their friends.
October 13th, 2005 at 2:50 pm
I’ll stick to trillian on windows and gaim on linux
October 13th, 2005 at 8:15 pm
I love trillian, the only thing that annoys me is that you can’t click on any links in the profiles of people with AIM, other than that one minor issue, it is awesome.