A heated battle which erupted last week between Microsoft and America Online over their respective instant messaging (IM) services looks set to run at least through autumn.
Internet messaging programs allow computer users to send notes directly to each other, or write back and forth to each other in a small onscreen window, in real time. Users also can see whether friends or colleagues are online, if the other person is willing. But until now the various messaging services were incompatible.
The dispute centres on whether one company's service should allow access to users of another company's service. Microsoft's new messaging program, called MSN Messenger, originally could be used to send messages to the 35 million users of AOL Instant Messaging, or AIM. But AOL immediately blocked its service, claiming Microsoft was breaching AIM users' security. MSN Messenger asks for AIM user names and passwords to link with AOL users.
Microsoft is presenting the dispute as an argument over "open standards" - agreed-upon technical protocols that let similar programs by different manufacturers inter-operate.
"Now is the time to unlock the broadest possibilities of this technology and the Internet by tearing down the walls between vendors so that all customers can talk to one another," said Microsoft and its allies in an open letter sent last week to Mr Steve Case, AOL's president and chief executive.
Over the past two weeks, Microsoft has issued a set of fixes to MSN Messenger on its website to allow the program to override blocks AOL has put in place on its servers and software to keep AIM users barricaded off from Messenger users.
Microsoft has said it will meet with supporters - which mostly include AOL competitors such as Excite, Prodigy, Yahoo and Infoseek - in September to try to resolve the dispute. AOL, the giant, 17-million member Internet service provider, said on Monday it had not been notified about the meeting. Prodigy and Yahoo both have their own IM services.
AOL, on the other hand, said it had formed an "advisory body" to establish IM standards, comprising companies that have been vocal Microsoft rivals, such as Sun Microsystems, Apple, RealNetworks and Novell.
IM services are enormously popular with Web users but so far have not brought in any direct revenue for their operators. However, analysts think the services may eventually generate income by delivering advertisements.
While Messenger is designed to access the users of rival services, Microsoft will not allow rival services to access Messenger users by going through Microsoft's servers, according to Silicon Valley programmer and industry commentator Mr Dave Winer. He believes server access may be the central issue in the dispute.
In a column this week he noted, "If I use Microsoft's server to feed messages to and from my IM client, then Microsoft does all the hard work and I get all the ad revenue. In other words, the eyeballs are mine and the headaches are Microsoft's." But he points out Microsoft is asking for this type of access to AOL's servers.
