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The most familiar AOL brand for many, many users is its AOL Instant Messenger. AIM counts some 43 million users. Were Time Warner to falter against Yahoo!, Google, and other companies looking to squeeze into the IM market, the competitors would waste no time in snatching millions of users away. It will be a bit of a relief for AOL/Time Warner followers to hear that AOL is paying close attention to AIM and courting developers. AIM is opening chat to programmers even more, letting them in to tinker and innovate so that AOL can keep this lead against fast up and comers like eBay's Skype.
Whether or not letting more people use the protocol allows AOL to continue dominance is unknown. It's still a bit of a risky gamble if developers just use the protocol to make their own IM applications. But the more people able to use AIM the more AOL can hold the marketshare in people's minds, and that'll be cheaper to do than by mailing CDs to every house in the country for brand recognition.
AOL opening up chat even further to protect dominance
Posted Jun 13th 2006 2:03PM by Tobias Buckell
Filed under: Press Releases, Products and Services, Industry, Competitive Strategy, Google (GOOG), Yahoo! (YHOO), eBay (EBAY), Time Warner (TWX)
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
6-13-2006 @ 3:10PM
Michael said...
It's important to look a step further when analyzing the "IM" market. The users are not willing to change, mainly becuase they all want to use the same program. You won't see a teenager switch to Google chat becuase it has video; his friends will all continue to use AOL's service, and then the entire purpose of chatting with friends becomes impossible. The lack of interconnectivity is what has kept AIM users as AIM users. By opening up the AIM client to outside development, I worry that AOL will lose some of that protection.
Also, the current AIM client is already bloated enough, no longer the simple "install, run" it once was.
Simply put, I do not like this move, and I would not count on it to produce any positive results for AOL or it's AIM service.