The next great thing: video instant messaging

Recently a group of bruised, battered and bedraggled high-tech executives floated the idea of a government bailout for the networking industry. The plan - promoted by Cisco CEO John Chambers, a loose confederation of Silicon Valley executives called TechNet, a lobbying group called the Computer Systems Policy Project and a Baby Bell-financed group called the Progress and Freedom Foundation - would provide a mixed bag of tax credits and taxpayer-underwritten incentives to get high-speed Internet access to every home in the nation by 2010.

This is a terrible way to implement a worthy idea and the kind of boondoggle approach that policy wonks love and the high-tech industry has heretofore fought tooth and nail. It is particularly ironic not just for the sudden embrace of a government handout in the heart of the marketplace anarchy of the Internet, but also because the killer application that is likely to save the broadband industry has finally come into view: video instant messaging.

Video instant messaging, which is integrated into Microsoft's Windows XP operating system, is going to make videoconferencing a ubiquitous part of the business and consumer landscape. Imagine those pop-up instant message windows with text, transformed into video screens, accessible natively any time the computer is powered up, and with video quality dependent upon bandwidth. Here, for the first time since Napster, is a bandwidth hog that might help fill all those networks that were built over the past few years. Better yet, unlike swapping obscure tunes, this application also feeds directly into a fundamental human need that can set the whole networking industry back on the fast track again: Keeping up with the Joneses. The video you can receive and transmit is only as good as your bandwidth and throughput. Instant visual-bandwidth feedback for every user is going to do more for the network industry than all the government programs Ralph Nader can dream up. After all, a slow static Web page download doesn't ultimately affect things once your screen is painted, but low-bandwidth video always looks bad.

For years videoconferencing was an idea that was much better imagined than practiced. Expensive equipment, complicated connections, confusing software - videoconferencing was the minicomputer of the communications revolution. However, integrate it tightly into the operating system of most workers' desktops, support any camera, make it as easy to use as clicking a button, give it a giant audience of potential addresses (every Windows XP desktop) - and most importantly, ensure it is capable of scaling up or down in quality depending on available network bandwidth - and you have a killer app.

Forget the government, guys. Put your faith in the capitalist system and human nature's desire for status. Say what you will about Microsoft, but the Redmond behemoth is about to pull the whole industry's fat out of the fire with the first great legal killer app of the Broadband Age.

Young, a founding editor of Forbes.com and MacWorld, is the author of Cisco Unauthorized, among other books. He can be reached at jsyoung@jsyoung.com.