At some point in the future, logging on to either MSN Messenger or Yahoo Messenger will enable a user to engage in IM sessions with registered users of both communities. Beta testing will commence later this year, with full rollout scheduled for late spring 2006. MSN and Yahoo claim a combined registered user base in excess of 275 million worldwide.
The walls between the global 'big four' IM services – AOL, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo – have been among the hardest on the Internet. These service providers have been resolutely opposed to any interoperability between each other, for fear of eroding their base of registered users. Until now, if an MSN user wanted to communicate with a friend who was on Yahoo, then that MSN user would need to be registered on Yahoo as well. But not for much longer, it seems.
What has caused such a big change in the attitude of these two service providers? They say: 'customer demand', and it's true that many end users would like a more open IM environment. In my opinion, however, the biggest external driver for this announcement must be MSN's and Yahoo's mutual need to defend themselves in the long term against Google. Both MSN and Yahoo have built their user bases around Internet communications services: instant messaging and email. Google is a relatively recent insurgent into messaging, but it is clearly determined to grow its presence there aggressively. MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger can defend themselves more formidably together than they could separately.
What does this mean for AOL? Might it draw some of their IM users away? Probably not, in my view. People want to communicate with other people, not with IM brands. If your friend is on AOL, and you want to IM with that friend, then you need to be on AOL too. The interoperability between MSN and Yahoo will not change that. Both MSN and Yahoo acknowledge that their users would like interoperability with AOL, but there are no public plans for that at present. It's worth noting that AOL's attitude to interoperability in the past has been characterised by reluctance at best, and outright hostility at worst.
Finally, will this have an impact the VoIP/telecoms industry? Well, certainly not yet: this announcement is confined to IM. However, both MSN and Yahoo have made recent technology acquisitions (Teleo and Dialpad respectively), in order to develop VoIP services. Although they are currently focusing on IM interoperability, MSN and Yahoo state that interoperability between their VoIP services is also on the roadmap at some future point. This is another area in which they would meet Google head-to-head, with its recently announced Google Talk service. However, the impact on telcos is likely to be minor for the foreseeable future, as all these VoIP services are will be used exclusively, or at least predominantly, for PC-to-PC conversations."
John Delaney is a Principal Analyst in Ovum's Consumer Group. The team analyses the consumer market for data and multimedia services on mobile networks and the Internet, including messaging, information and entertainment.
