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http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=708
AOL: Rival Technologies "Too Expensive" to Integrate into IM
By Remy Davison, Insanely Great Mac
July 25th 2002
AOL-Apple relationship consolidated as AOL pushes MSN and Yahoo out of the IM space.
AOL has said it is reducing the resources it is putting into compatibility with other
instant messaging clients.
"Too difficult" and "too expensive", say AOL in an Associated Press article. As a
result, third-party developers, such as Apple, which develops iChat, will need to
contract with AOL to run the instant messaging services.
While iChat will be compatible, other services, such as Yahoo''s and Microsoft''s,
will not be compatible, as these companies do not have AOL agreements.
AOL''s Instant Messenger (IM) is the market leader with 150 million subscribers. Users
of Yahoo and MS services will not be able to communicate with AOL''s IM users.
According the article, AOL said it would consider interoperability proposals. However,
AOL said it had noted significant technical difficulties even if such a standard were
agreed upon.
The ''hosted'' relationship with Apple, said AOL, was preferable and allowed AOL to
devote sources to IM, rather than R&D into enduring third-party client compatibility.
In the case of iChar, Apple writes the software, while AOL takes care of user names
and IM transmission. In this respect, AOL effectively acts as the back-end ISP to
Apple''s front-end software.
AOL claims that its market data shows that 34 million people used the IM service in
June via AOL. 29 million used MSN''s Messenger, while 20 million used Yahoo Messenger
over the same period. 8 million used ICQ, which is owned by AOL.
Under enti-trust regulations resulting from the AOL-Time Warner merger approval, AOL
is prohibited from using its IM over Time-Warner cables, unless it opened up its IM to
rival players, or it can demonstrate significantly altered market conditions.
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