Move It or Lose It, AOL

It's not nice to talk badly about someone behind his back, but then again, AOL was at PCIA GlobalXChange.

According to Cahners In-Stat Group, the worldwide wireless-data market will grow from 170 million to greater than 1.3 billion users in 2004. And messaging will be the primary driver of wireless data over the next few years.

But this anticipated growth could be stymied by AOL. No one in the wireless industry is pleased with the way AOL has been dragging its feet in working with the industry to establish a standard for instant messaging (IM), and some could hardly hide their disgust during a GlobalXChange panel session.

The barriers to instant messaging are AOL, disparate networks and numeric keypads, said Rebecca Diercks, Cahners In-Stat Group director, wireless research.

"Instant messaging has positive momentum, and the U.S. market could explode if AOL breaks down the walls, an IM unified standard is developed and a wide variety of end-user devices are promoted," she said.

But AOL, which currently controls 90% of the IM market, is clearly the biggest stumbling block. AOL doesn't seem to care, but U.S. wireless providers, who have launched or will soon launch 2-way messaging services, should. The main IM problem has been interoperability and open standards, or their lack. It's no good for consumers if AOL's IM systems don't work with other IM systems such as MSN Instant Messenger or Yahoo Everywhere.

Even Microsoft understands the problem, which limits it to a paltry 17 million messages a day on the MSN Messenger service. Francis DeSouza, product manager of IM, matter-of-factly said: "Interoperability will happen, like the law of gravity."

But others aren't so sure. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is developing an IM protocol. In an ideal IM world, all programs that conform to the standard will be able to communicate with all other compliant programs. The IM and Presence Protocol is an open standard, but AOL has resisted accepting the protocol for its IM programs.

The road to developing a standard so far has been a rough one: AOL and other IETF members such as Microsoft and Prodigy have clashed over AOL's IM monopoly. In fact, AOL's unwillingness to open its IM networks to competitors' programs has prompted rival companies to file complaints with the U.S. government.

DeSouza explained, in a somewhat tentative tone, that AOL is coming around and may begin working finally with the IETF on three IM protocols it is considering for adoption. But with all the bad blood around the issue, it's unlikely that anything less than a court date will get AOL to budge.

Until it does, the IM market in the U.S. will be stagnant, and all those cool new IM applications you saw at GlobalXChange might never make it to wireless devices.

Ross Buckenham, WebLink Wireless president, bravely predicted that "wireless IM is the killer app for the next 12 to 24 months." But that, unfortunately, depends almost entirely upon AOL.