Another Microsoft climbdown- against AOL

The other day, some industry analyst had remarked that Microsoft would not rule the net. Check this. On the Internet, first it was the browser war which at this point tilts in favour of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. But in the battle of the instant messenger, Microsoft's recent fortunes with litigation seems to spillover. It had to concede defeat in its battle with rival America Online and agree that users had a serious security risk.

Instant messaging is a small turf but Microsoft saw big value in it when it moved in in July 1999 with its MSN Messenger, lined up against Netscape's (read AOL, since AOL had bought over Netscape) AIM Instant Messenger and Yahoo's pager. All these products allow registered user groups to exchange messages live online, a kind of restricted chat, besides other live data feeds like stock quotes, classifieds, ads, games and offline messaging. All three were available free to users and were popular.

But then AOL exposed a very serious security bug in MSN's interoperability feature with AOL and declared that Microsoft's software essentially hacked into its servers without authorization and blocked the service. This led to  hectic activity and trading charges.

Version 2.0 of Microsoft's MSN Messenger Service released recently eliminated the interoperability with America Online's AIM instant messaging service which had Microsoft officials calling for a move towards a universal standard that would allow users of different software to send instant messages to each other, as in email services. But interoperability carries a serious risk of privacy and security and which no company can afford to go slack on.

But numbers clearly point to AOL as the leading one with about 80 million users while Microsoft and Yahoo have about 4.5 million each.