Slashdot Mirror
The Business of Instant Messaging
willll writes "The Washington Post is running a story about how AOL plans to make money from Instant Messaging, one of the few successes in recent times for AOL. This article includes plans for corporate versions of AIM as well as discussion on some of the state on instant messaging."
Mark my words on this. If instant messaging is adopted by U.S. businesses, the economy will suffer like it has never suffered before. Productivity will come to a halt, and innovation will be stagnant for 10-15 years as a result.
Instant Messaging seems good at first. Always connected, always available -- I mean wow, what could possibly be bad about that?
But those of you who've chatted know what I'm talking about. We know the trap that's there.
Please stay away from enterprise IM applications. You and your boss will be glad you were able to resist the latest business fad.
Let's get back to the old bottom line and red/black calculations. Nothing -- not War, not Instant Messaging, nothing else -- will get us out of this depression that we're experiencing.
We'll have to wait it out. But when we finally escape, we'll be glad we didn't embrace IM. What a waste of time/money that'd have been.
Background: 28/M/Bi-Sexual; Owner of a Linux company; MBA Harvard 2003; B.S. Comp Sci MIT 2000
Ha, they can charge all they want and I'll keep using Trillian. If they cut that off, we still have IRC!
Brought to you by the Artificial Idea Factory.
I hate it when they say... this @$#@ thing has an untapped audience, when aol pushes so much spam...
sounds like IM will likely contain instant URLs for adertersing soon..
Crap
More than 1.1 billion Instant Messages are sent out worldwide every day. For no reason.
IMs are an attention-grabbing and nonsensical, not to mention unproductive, means of communication. Most people who use IMs to talk or share information also have access to other, non-IM technologies that pollute the Internet less and are cheaper.
IMs are some of the most wasteful products, in terms of resources used, that continue to be marketed on our planet. Why do we send them out by the billions? Just to enjoy the transient pleasure of saying LOL time and time again?
Background: 28/M/Bi-Sexual; Owner of a Linux company; MBA Harvard 2003; B.S. Comp Sci MIT 2000
No, the most trivial application of the Internet is arguably the most used and most useful. It isn't the most profitable--that's what the whole article is about: How to milk money out of something that virtually no-one is willing to pay for.
At least it seems they're aimed right--they want to try to sell different IM versions to corporations. Whether or not that will be successful remains to be seen; many companies already use IM as-is for free and about the only significant "add-on" could be security; and some independent IM clients already offer SSL encryption anyway. So I'm hard pressed to see where there's any motivation for a company to pay for it. Anything so important or sensitive so as to require SSL probably won't be discussed with a few instant messages anyway.
But it appears they're not stupid enough to want to charge users for what they already have for free. That'd kill IM in a heartbeat I bet.