IM as the New Phone
Many decades ago, companies marketing the telephone struggled to find a market. The phone was pitched as the new radio in many cases--monthly subscription fees would allow customers to listen in to live events. At six pm on Sunday evening, for example, the familiy might gather around the telephone and take turns listening to a live symphony broadcast over the phone.
In the case of Instant Messaging, the companies already have widespread adoption: millions of users regularly communicate over clients such as MSN's, AOL's, or Yahoo's client. The difficulty with this use pattern, though, is that it doesn't generate enough money. Initially started as free services to encourage subscription to various ad-revenue or fee services, their current ubiquitious use makes them appear as untapped markets to large (and small) corporations.
In this
c|net interview, David Gurle, former MS exec now working on collaborative technologies such as IM at Reuters, offers some insight into where corporations are attempting to head with IM. And, unsurprisingly, they're rearticulating IM back into earlier technologies with proven markets:
I'm saying that Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo will become the equivalent of phone companies of the future, and with a reach that will go beyond their reach today. That reach will be global and without boundaries. With phone carriers, they can only go where the wire goes.
All of which is fine, except that in the articulation
IM = New Phone, users are discouraged from other types of uses and developers are discouraged from offering new potentials for the technologies. At one point, for example, Gurle refers to IM as "the perfect disruptive technology". This is a phrase I've used myself to describe IM use in classrooms and workplaces. But where I'm thinking about disruptions to the power structure of the classroom and workplace, where Gurle positions that disruption as a marketing opportunity: disrupting the telephone industry to allow information companies (Reuters, for example) to claim telephone market share.
Posted by johndan at September 28, 2003 11:32 AM
| TrackBack