Peer to Peer: Collaboration and Sharing over the Internet

Messaging Technologies

At the time of writing, the IM market is in the grip of what we could well call the “ IM Wars”, akin to the intense “browser wars” that characterized the last decade before Internet Explorer became the dominant Web browser.

The similarities to the browser wars are striking in that intentional incompatibilities are incorporated to prevent interoperability between rival clients, and that the rival companies are fiercely competing for users by offering ever more features and extensions to the basic messaging service. A series of buyouts have restructured part of the market, so that for example Miribilis ICQ, dominating the IM field, was acquired and incorporated into AOL with unclear aims for the future. Microsoft as usual ...