January 2006 Archives

My dad refuses to use IM, says it's a hassle. "Just email me" he says "I am not tethered to my PC like you ya know!".

Some of us use Instant Messaging and Email everyday, nearly always in contact and never far from a PC. There are many who shy away from IM because it's too instant. They are busy during the day and do not have much time for impromptu conversations on a PC and you can forget about them using IM on a wireless device. The have learned email and that frankly that is working just fine for them.

I am getting this not just from my aging retired parents but also professionals I know in the industry. They are busy! No time for IM conversations and they want to be able to track the conversations they have without a great deal of trouble.

Dad said he would probably use it more if they could pick up the IM messages he missed in the same Inbox as his email and when it's convenient for him, via online web mail or in Outlook on his laptop.

I wanted to suggest a work-around but when I started thinking about this I could not for the life of me come up with an easy solution that would work for him. I don't know of any hosted services out there nor are there any plug-ins for the likes of MS Outlook that allow for shared IM and Mail message retrieval. My Dad uses Outlook and I read somewhere that there are 400 Million Outlook users out there today. There are hundreds of millions of users on various IM clients. Why can't we retrieve offline or online IM messages (regardless of his IM client) in Outlook?

Yes, MSN Messenger has "pager mode" but it doesn't work when the user is offline. There are often times when I forget (sometimes for days) to log into the current 5 IM clients I run and I end up missing conversations and sometimes opportunities. Those messages should come through to my email and also be stored on a central server if I so choose, although web mail would be fine for this. Attachments could be sent via IM and end up in your email inbox, there are some security concerns here.

In the mobile world this makes even more sense, who has time to deal with IM on a mobile device? BlackBerries are popular with the business crowd because they can get their email just about anywhere and when it's convenient for them. If you want to communicate with those people it had better be email, and many of them have IM.

Buddy Andy has accepted a position on SightSpeed's Advisory Board. SightSpeed is a Voice and Video over IP (VVoIP) player that has been around for quite some time and their technology seems to work pretty good albeit it does not seem to be based open standards.

The largest proprietary operator in this space is Skype, I wonder how SightSpeed's patented technology stacks up. It might also be difficult to compete with the likes of Counterpath and now Eyeball as they get ready to roll out their new open standards federated VoIP, Video and IM client.

I am sure Andy will steer them in the right direction.

Om asked me to express my opinion as a guest poster on his blog. Here is an exerpt..

We humans tend to have short memories and sometimes that works to our advantage. Maybe it’s all that cortisol flowing through our brains zapping our memories. Whatever it is we tend to forget things we swore we never would.

The ability to lose is also ours according to Microsoft, Skype, Vonage and many others in the mix. In many ways its worse than it was in the old days. I can’t use many of these proprietary devices to call into another service using the same technology. These new age telephone companies will tell you that they can’t make enough money by openly peering with other networks, they need to hold us captive in order to make ends meet. Hmm, it doesn’t seem like we have come very far at all does it.

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Om wrote a great piece last week on VoIP Silos which is something I have been preaching since the first day I got into this business more than 10 years ago. Proprietary software and now priprietary software in hardware offerings is not the way to win the war.

The IM vendors are getting the hint but Microsoft and Google are battling back and forth so it would seem it might be a while before we can expect anything good there.

Get your heads out of your asses people! Open standards and interop is far better for the consumer, remember them?- the ones buying this crap!

Symantec has announced that it will acquire IMlogic to add more to its security and management of instant messaging. Apparently terms were held back due to SEC regs. These two companies were already major partners and the fit here seems to make a great deal of sense.

This acquisition follows a $370 million purchase of e-mail security vendor Brightmail in 2004 and the $11 billion buy-out of Veritas in July, 2005.

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