You've got hypocrisy

As the self-appointed voice of instant messaging users worldwide, I must say, Mr. Case and Mr. Levin, I'm sorely disappointed.

We thought you guys were going to be different. When you consummated last year's deal of the century, you created what all the analysts promised was going to be the new model for companies in the new millennium. It was a marriage of old media and new. It was the cooperative way companies would come together so they didn't fight over silly things like who has access to whose network and what content can be put in what format. It was all for the betterment of us customers.

The deal was the opposite of the Bell company mergers in which one company calls it a “merger of equals” and the other is equalized with a long list of former managers. You weren't supposed to act like those monolithic Bell heads, burying your heads in the technology of yesterday and hiding behind the spit-polished lawyers who could scare a Gambino “family” member into a life of piety.

So much for the new model.

As part of the merger between your two former companies, regulators made you promise to not offer any of the neat new stuff that can be done via instant messaging — things like voice and video-enhanced IM — without offering interoperability in some form to one of your 30 or so competitors.

Like most big companies, you hemmed and hawed while your lieutenants tackled bigger issues, like how to weasel into a sweet window office in Rockefeller Plaza. When your combined company finally made the jump, after a good stall tactic in July, it picked Lotus as the preferred “competitor.” Forgive the sports analogy, but picking Lotus as your preferred IM competitor is like the Lakers playing a pickup game against a local junior varsity team and calling it a contest. They play the same game on the same size court with the same type of ball, but that's where the similarities end.

Lotus, while certainly a large company within an even larger company, meets the criteria of a competitor in name only. While it produces a piece of software that provides the same functions as your ubiquitous AOL IM, Lotus also had been working with your company for several months before the announcement.

More important, the company's SameTime software is specifically aimed at enterprise users, and those of us sitting behind a firewall know AIM and corporate IT departments don't always get along so well.

Why not pick a competitor that actually competes? You've got at least 20 competitors that go after the same consumer market but whose annual revenue barely exceeds your monthly budget for carpet cleaning — companies like PalTalk, Odigo and ActiveBuddy that are actively trying to interoperate but won't get very far without your cooperation.

We could understand why you wouldn't want to bring in Yahoo or MSN. They're big, scary competitors that not only would be happy to have access your 20 million-plus users but also have enough technology up their sleeves that they might threaten your IM dominance.

That's where things get interesting. Like it or not, IM is a potential form of voice competition. Just a few clicks away within the AIM software — and even closer in competitors' clients — is the makings of a no-charge voice call. You know it, the IM market knows it and eventually the incumbent telcos and their lawyers are going to know it.

The question then becomes: Will you fulfill the new model or not? Will you really be different than the “old-line” Bell heads?

Based on your initial choice of a competitor, we're not the most hopeful bunch.
Contact Vince Vittore at vvittore@primediabusiness.com