Over the last five years, America Online (AOL), Yahoo! and Microsoft fighting to grab market share for their instant messaging (IM) services. Each company has its own software and networks to provide services, which allows users to write on the Internet, real-time text messages with other users on the same network. Although IM started as a small company in 1996, four Israeli engineers, it has grown into one of the major means of communication on the Internet. The number of IM users has grown 30% faster than in the first five years than e-mail when it was first launched. Today, almost half of all North American online households use some version of IM. Despite the large number of users of IM, three major providers - AOL, Yahoo! and Microsoft - not earned any significant profit from the provision of services. Each company has its own IM service for free, and many questions remain, as any company, one day earn his millions. Some looked at the possibility of developing a corporate IM technology as a tool that enables employees to securely send messages to each other, and efforts were already underway to make this a reality. The company also made significant efforts to develop common protocols for instant messaging, which allows users to communicate through a variety of networks. But the competition is holding back progress, causing analysts to wonder whether consumers will continue to put up with a few programs to achieve IM friends in different networks. "Hide
by W. Brian Viard, Stephen Fan Source: Stanford Graduate School of Business 27 pages. Publication Date: February 28, 2005. Prod. #: SM138-PDF-ENG
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