Paying attention to the messaging

It is funny what we do and don't pay attention to in the computer business. "Little company gets the runaround by big company" doesn't make the news but "Big company runs around enormous company" does. Perhaps I'd better explain....

Earlier this year, Prodigy - once the poster child of the consumer online world, now an enfeebled but still fighting ISP - released Prodigy Instant Messaging (PIM). PIM is a utility that does what America Online's Instant Messenger (AIM) does.

For those of you who have managed to remain blissfully unaware of AIM, let me enlighten you: AIM is a program that lets you chat with your buddies online. Once you and your buddy register with an AOL server and you log on, that server checks to see if any of your friends are also running AIM.

If you are logged on and any of your friends suddenly logs on, AIM makes an irritating sound like a squeaky door opening and lets you have a text chat session with them. Kind of interesting, unless you're a teenager, in which case it is apparently on par with having your own phone.

<digression> I'm getting burnt out on the plethora of sounds applications now generate. Combine those noises with the various beeps and pings that hardware delivers and the average office starts to sound like the depths of the rain forest. And if you like to work with music playing, the mix can be very irritating. The Windows start-up theme goes very poorly with Sly & Robbie's "Drum & Bass Strip To The Bone," the album of the month here at Gibbs Towers. </digression>

<bytheway> And there's another problem: identifying what is making a particular sound. I have been trying to track down something in my office that is beeping every few minutes for almost a month. I have enough equipment in here to make this difficult, and the damn thing has never gone off when I'm near it. </bytheway>

Anyway, one of the neat things about PIM is, or rather was, its ability to interoperate with AIM. I say "was" because despite openly publishing the specifications for instant message-style communications to foster a third-party market, AOL decided that Prodigy was the kind of third party it didn't want involved and blocked interoperation between PIM and AOL's back-end services. Was that much news? Nope.

Now Microsoft has got in the instant messaging act with its own version, Microsoft Messenger, and AOL has done the same thing to the Redmond mafia's product. Is that news? You bet.

I suspect the reason it is news is simply because Microsoft is involved. This means there is a real, valuable market to be fought over, something that little ol' Prodigy's involvement could never validate.

The really interesting thing here is AOL's positioning. It smacks of all the antitrust-type behavior of which AOL accused Microsoft! Steve old buddy, you can't have it both ways.

Be that as it may, it raises the question of wither instant messaging? Will the market explode into a number of isolated communities? Will some enterprising hacker create a bridge between the two systems? (Perhaps a server running multiple copies of Messenger, AIM and PIM in some kind of wild proxy setup?) Or will the market, in a mass bid for freedom, go with the first vendor to offer a truly open standard?

Microsoft is (somewhat uncharacteristically) leading the charge for an open standard, but I'd love to see the Internet Engineering Task Force or the World Wide Web Consortium get ultradynamic and get involved.

This fracas is going to be entertaining, and as it is played out, the politics will show the combatants in all their commercial glory. My money is on AOL losing out. But you can bet we'll pay attention.

News to nwcolumn@gibbs.com.