This may sound a bit compulsive, but don't you think that email takes just too darn long to get to where its going?
(((AOL signing on sound....bling!)))
Well, enter a solution: instant messaging from America Online. Its been around for years, and lets AOL users see when their buddies are online and have on-screen private chats in real time. We use it at work to talk to each other rather than shout around cubicles.
But AOL Instant Messenger is only good for other AOL users... so Yahoo, and now Microsoft, figured out a way to let their users join the fun... for a brief few days last week, net surfers could chat no matter which company they belonged to.
(((Door Slam)))
Then AOL found out, and created a technical blockade... keeping the Yahoo and Microsoft riffraff from entering their precious 25 million user world. Now AOL and Bill Gates are locked in a civil war over their competing real time internet chat programs.... a war which is as silly as it sounds. 1:00
Once again, Microsoft has found itself having to copy someone else's ideas to get into the game, but this time they're trying to use the Internet's official standards bodies to prop up their less-than-compelling technology. This from a company with little regard for open standards... Web browsers from Microsoft display pages very differently from Netscape. Microsoft's own email program doesn't do a very good job of following internet standards either. In fact, most of Microsoft's net products don't inter-operate well with the competition. 1:30
So what then of AOL's quest to keep Microsoft's mitts off their users? AOL -- the world's largest proprietary, non-standards-based online service -- is coming off like a petchulant (sp?) teenager, breaking their toys so other kids can't play with them. Granted, Microsoft is asking AOL users for their passwords -- a typical Microsoft blunder and a true security violation -- but AOL has gathered up some of Bill Gates' biggest enemies to figure out how to solve this problem. Not exactly the way we learned to mediate problems in Montessori School. 2:00
You can start to see how childish this all is. Imagine if the phone company worked this way. AT&T customers could never talk with MCI customers. Or if your car would run on Texaco gas, but not Mobil. You'd be real angry, and that's the backlash that's about to slap Microsoft and AOL right in the chat room. 2:20
All sides in this conflict are abusing the truth, trying to come out looking like they are on the side of the consumer. Microsoft, which has subverted the Internet standards process time and time again, now claims that AOL is violating the prinicipals of the Net... AOL, which holds a virtual monopoly on instant messaging says Microsoft isn't playing fair. 2:40
Look guys, all we want to do is send messages to people online. One standard way of doing this is inevitable, and eventuallyypou're going to have to agree. So stop wasting our time subversively getting into AOL's systems, whining about standards, and blockading Microsoft users. Perhaps you could spend a few of these wasted bucks making software that doesn't crash my machine so often and doesn't require me to buy a new PC every time you releaase a new version. 3:10
(((Goodbye)))
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Rich Dean is Director of E-Commerce at MysteryNet.com.