FROM NY TIMES
July 24, 1999
In Cyberspace, Rivals Skirmish for
Control Over Messaging
By SAUL HANSELL
merica Online Friday closed its online service to people using new
software from two of its fiercest rivals, Microsoft and Yahoo, that
had been designed to tap into one of America Online's most popular
features: instant messages.
On Thursday, both Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo introduced software that
could send messages to some 40 million users of AOL Instant
Messaging, a program that enables people to hold "real time" dialogs.
Unlike standard e-mail, which arrives in a recipient's in-box to be read
only when it is opened, instant-messaging software places a message in
an open window on the recipient's computer screen only seconds after it
is sent.
And, unlike e-mail, these systems have until now been closed, meaning
that users of one system cannot connect to users of another.
AIM is part of the software distributed to America Online's 17 million
members, and it is available for free as a stand-alone product to anyone
who takes the time to download the program from www.aol.com. Many
computer manufacturers also install it on all their machines.
Its widespread use has made it a de facto standard for instant messaging
over the Internet, which is why Microsoft, the world's biggest software
company, and Yahoo, the most heavily trafficked site on the World Wide
Web, designed their software so that it could interact with AIM. But this
is not a simple matter of adopting the same rules for addressing the
messages, because one of AIM's most popular and useful features is its
"buddy list," which notifies a user when friends or others on the user's list
log on to the Internet.
To determine which users of AIM are online at any given time, the new
products from Microsoft and Yahoo had to blaze a path into America
Online's servers in a way that America Online says violated its copyrights
and trademark
Late Thursday night, America Online blocked both products, as last
month it had blocked a similar product by Prodigy.
But Microsoft refused to roll over. Late Friday, the software giant said it
had revised its MSN Messenger program to circumvent America
Online's block. Within hours, America Online answered that challenge
with a new block.
The feud is an odd reversal of the war over Internet browsers between
Microsoft and Netscape Communications Corp., which America Online
now owns. Now, Microsoft is arguing that America Online is using its
exclusive technology to prevent fair competition based on open
standards. That is exactly the complaint from Netscape that prompted
the U.S. Justice Department to file an antitrust suit against Microsoft now
being tried in Washington.
The stakes are enormous because instant messages have become one of
the most popular uses of the Internet, letting users chat throughout the
day with their friends.
America Online believes so strongly in instant messages that last year it
paid $325 million for a competing instant-message service called ICQ
(for I Seek You), even though it had never earned a dime of revenue.
Today, America Online's two instant-message services have 80 million
users, who send 780 million messages a day, more than all the mail
handled in a day by the U.S. Postal Service.
America Online argues that the programs offered by Microsoft and
Yahoo were inappropriately gaining access to its internal computer
systems without its permission.
What is more, users of both the Microsoft and Yahoo programs are
asked to type in their America Online password, something America
Online discourages. Indeed, one of the most common abuses on America
Online is when hackers pretend to be customer service representatives
and ask innocent users for their passwords.
"They are undermining all the efforts that AOL has put into making an
environment that people can trust," said Ann Brackbill, a spokeswoman
for the company. Internet executives argued that America Online is
hurting its own users by this policy.
"Why should I demand that all my friends use the same instant-message
system in order to communicate with me," said Steve Glenn, chief
executive of People Link, which makes instant-message software. "What
is right is for consumers to have a choice."
There are efforts by an industry consortium to develop a standard so that
Instant messages, like e-mail, can be exchanged universally. But that
standard has not been completed, nor has America Online committed to
comply with it.
In the mean time, Microsoft, which is a latecomer to the instant-message
business, used a technique called reverse engineering to make its
software mimic the behavior of AOL's own program. This is no different,
the company argues, than if it found a way to make its word processing
program read files created by competing programs.
"It is a big benefit for our users if they can speak with someone on any
instant-message system," said Deanna Sanford, a product manager with
Microsoft.
Yahoo and Prodigy say they didn't need to use reverse engineering
because America Online actually published the specifications to its
instant-messaging system on its Internet site and authorized other people
to link into it.
And indeed, America Online did create a version of the
instant-messaging program using the increasingly popular structure known
as open source software, in which programs are published in a form that
users can see how they work and make modifications. The most popular
open source programs are Linux, a rapidly growing version of the Unix
operating system, and AOL's Netscape Navigator browser which was
shifted to open source last year.
America Online said that the only reason it published an open source
version of its instant-messaging program was so that Linux users could
communicate with each other and with their friends who used AOL's
other products. The company said it never intended for companies to use
that version as the basis for a mass market product.
But Yahoo and Prodigy said that America Online had clearly made the
instant-message system available for them to use.
"We based our product on the America Online site, which never once
said there were limits as to who this was intended for," said Brian Park, a
senior producer at Yahoo.
Bill Kirkner, the chief technology officer of Prodigy, said America Online
was being "disingenuous" to cut off that company's message system after
publishing the open source version.
"This is how the Internet works. People build software, and other people
build on it and improve it," Kirkner said.
He said that America Online has told Prodigy that it in order to let its
users send messages to AOL users, Prodigy must pay a fee and use
AOL's proprietary AOL messaging software, which carries advertising
that AOL sells.
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