This battle is fun to watch, but you're right that it also has deeper significance.
A ZDNet story deals with the problems AOL's blocking has caused for their lobbying group, the so-called "Open-Net" coalition:
Is AOL the height of hypocrisy?
zdnet.com
"Open is open," said Legg Mason Precursor Group analyst Scott Cleland, who has long predicted that AOL will ultimately prevail and gain access to cable high speed Internet services. "When you're denying consumers a choice of something, it looks bad in any case."
Online analyst Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications, predicted AOL's position on cable access would ultimately trump its decision to close up its instant messaging product.
AOL has shown its true colors in the IM battle. It isn't really an internet service provider. It's a network gatekeeper that happens to give its customer access to most parts of the internet. But it hides the internet behind proprietary tools that it then uses to direct and control its users. It's as far from an "open" system as an internet service can be.
I think you're right, t2, that Microsoft has positioned itself wonderfully from a PR perspective in this battle. They appear to be the ones fighting the good fight for open standards and customer choice.
It took Microsoft a long time to learn the "standards" lesson, but they've learned it well. It was Netscape that taught them taught them best. In many ways, Netscape was more responsible than Microsoft itself for the ultimate design of IE 4. While Microsoft sought to saddle the browser with a conglomeration of proprietary MS-created protocols and interfaces, Netscape fought a PR battle for "open" internet standards. It turned out that Netscape had the better story (and "story" is all-important in Redmond). Microsoft made an abrupt about-face and actually embraced the standards. Unfortunately for Netscape, Microsoft implemented the "story" much better than Netscape itself and came up with a better browser.
Now it's Microsoft's turn to teach that same lesson to Netscape's new parent.
But behind all that is the fun notion of the actual skirmish. Can you imagine how many 32-hour days have been put into this by teams in both Redmond and Dulles? I imagine the AOL team falling back into couches and sighing after they'd manage to change their protocols that first time, test them, and release them. "We beat them!" I suspect they said.
Ah, but even more interesting is the thought of the hacker glee in Redmond that must have greeted the challenge. Within hours, they had back-engineered AOL's changes, overcome them, tested the changes and released an easily-installed new version. "You idiots," I imagine hearing. "Don't even think you can keep us out of there."
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