Fortune magazine is so happy that they finally got a review with her, that they put Melinda Gates-French on their cover. Their latest Microsoft relate story is less congratulatory. If Josh Quittner is right, Microsoft is once again using less than exemplary business practices to grow its fortune.
His story is that Microsoft is strong-arming social networks and such into giving Microsoft Messenger preferential treatment over other instant messengers.
Many such sites are offering the ability to import contact lists from other services, such as Hotmail. Once users start doing that, Microsoft first has its lawyers send a cease-and-desist letter, and then has its marketing reps making offers to integrate Microsoft Messenger into their services. For services offering integrating with multiple Instant Messengers, Microsoft demands that Microsoft Messenger gets top billing. Even then, Microsoft demands a 25 dollar-cent site license fee per user per year, However, Microsoft will generously forgo that license fee if the start-up decides to support Microsoft Messenger exclusively.
As if that were not bad enough, Microsoft’s rather one-sided terms apparently also demand that if these start-ups ever want to add search functionality, they must, for a period of sixty days, negotiate with Microsoft and Microsoft only.
Despite the one-sided fee, Microsoft is also demanding that the start-ups open their contact books to Microsoft. Josh Quittner seems to think that is reasonable, I do not agree. Opening up both ways seems reasonable, it sounds fair and logical, and it is definitely what the user wants. It just does not sound not so fair and logical if one party is already paying the other for access. Surely the other party should be able to demand the same fee for the reciprocal service. Microsoft would still win out because of the sheer number of HotMail contacts lists being imported.
The deeper problem is of course that the user is the victim in all this. Your data is yours, and you should be able to move it between services. The truly sickening thing about this deal, if true, is that as Microsoft makes those exclusive deals, that exclude other services, Microsoft Messenger will become the most connected instant messenger. That superior connectedness will make Microsoft seem to be the most open instant messaging provider, while they are in the fact the one putting up walls between the different services.
It is true? Quittner quotes Brian Hall, general manager for Windows Live as saying he does not know about such contracts, downplaying term sheets as merely showing what Microsoft wants, not what it ultimately gets, and admitting that Redmond might be looking for a more favourable deal with small companies because the exchange of contacts is so lopsided.
Brian Hall also has a great excuse. It is all in the name of security. Those third parties are storing HotMail login info. That is actually a great argument and I do not doubt that there is some data breach in our future that will shake users awake to this reality.
However, if Microsoft were truly concerned about the security, it would not focus on obtaining favourable terms, but on best practices instead. It would offer free consulting services to make sure the integration is done right. It would cooperate with other instant messenger vendors to set up a vendor-independent Safe Login to Instant Messaging (SLIM) protocol and certification program to assure users that the service they are dealing with does not store their login details.
Then again, the problems with transfer of data would not exist if Microsoft Messenger supported open messaging protocols, such as the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). XMPP is an Internet Standard (RFC 3920 and RFC 3921) promoted by the XMPP Standards Foundation, which manages extension that conform to the XMPP Extension Protocol (XEP).
Google Talk already supports XMPP. The other two big proprietary players, AOL and ICQ, are moving to support XMPP. Microsoft’s strategy of continuing to push for its proprietary protocol may end up leaving them alone in an insignificant corner of the instant messaging universe.
I advice start-ups to support these standards, to obtain integration with all other clients and services that support these standards. Once you support that, you are not only doing the right thing, you will also find vendors that continue to rely on their proprietary protocols to be considerable less demanding.
Start-ups must spend their funding wisely, allocate their development resources carefully .With big players like Google, AOL and ICQ behind the standards, there is no reason to pay proprietary players. Instead, there is good reason to demand compensation for the time and effort it will take to integrate with proprietary protocols.
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.