May 2004 (Revised March 2005)
Case
HBS Case Collection

Instant Messaging

By: David B. Yoffie and Deborah Freier

Format:Print
| Pages:3

Abstract

Explores the usage and technology of instant messaging (IM). IM enables two or more users to communicate almost instantaneously over the Internet with short, private text messages. Most IM service providers chose to remain proprietary and, therefore, a user of most IM services could not communicate with a user employing a different IM service: both users had to use the same service to communicate. Although AOL had dominated the consumer IM market since its launch in 1997, Microsoft and Yahoo! seemed to be closing in on AOL's lead. Consumers complained about the lack of interoperability between IM services. In addition to being used in the home, IM was becoming more common in the workplace. According to IDC, about 76.3 million people worldwide used IM at work in 2003. The majority of users (about 53.9 million) used the consumer IM services offered by AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo! The other 22.4 million used services purchased by their employers. In 2004, there were two competing standards in the enterprise IM arena: Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) and the Session Initiation Protocol for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE).