Yet again I was asked to sit on the Instant Messaging Planet Conference's panel on Interoperabilty. I think this is the third time I have weighed in on the topic, and you might think it would get a little cobwebby by this point, but nothing is further from the truth.

Prior to the panel, which was held last Wednesday afternoon in San Jose CA, interoperability contention had spontaneously broken out in other panels, notably the 'Public versus Private Networks' panel, where Ken Hickman of Yahoo! at one point read from a newstory, quoting a Microsoft spokesperson who reportedly said something like "We are interested in standards that we can control," and confronting MSN representative Peter Olidart with these comments in contrast to the more open and even tone earlier in the panel.

What's the Big Deal?

Although there are some real technical issues with inter-network instant messaging interoperability, the general mantra is that interoperability is *not* a technical problem. (This leaves aside quality of service and mismatched functionality issues, which are real.) The real barrier to public networks supporting intercommunication is the lack of a business model that makes sense. How are Yahoo, MSN, and AOL supposed to monetize their investments without jeopardizing their business strategies?

Many argue that it is in the public interest for interoperablity to exist -- just like local number portability, which the carriers did not want to support. However, I don't believe that the government is likely to insert itself here. The FCC had a chance, years ago, in the AOL anti-trust heatings, and declined to do more than restrict AOL's IM service functionality -- and that has been relaxed recently. More likely we will witness a bottom-up, one-deal-at-a-time sort of rapprochement between the major networks, and then -- after some period of one-off solutions being sold to large consumer-oriented businesses -- the floodgates will open and a near-universal system for interoperability will be available.

These near-term deals are fairly obvious. Say you are the CIO of GM, and you would like to communicate through IM to the 8M+ individuals that work in your multi-tier supply chain. You are unlikely to want to contend with the issues of rolling out specialized and expensive IM clients to all these folks, or putting them into your corporate LDAP tables. Much more interesting is to presume that most of these people have access to public IM. Then the trick is simply linking a person with an IM identifier (or 'screen name').

The problems of authenticating these folks' identities aside, this is extremely attractive to GM (or Xerox, or Accenture, or any super large company). The benefits that the super large companies will gain from real-time connectivity in the supply chain or other functional areas may be no larger on a percentage basis that large, medium, or small companies but the absolute monetary rewards are so large that they can afford to hassle deals with the networks and build customized solutions for consumer IM connectivity with vendors like IMlogic, Facetime, Akonix, and others.

The trail to interoperability will be blazed by super large companies, and relatively quickly, other pieces will start to fall into place making this affordable for others. For example, the public networks are already offering services (like Microsoft's MSN Connect) that will allow an enterprise to use 'stoweboyd@aworkingmodel.com' style URLs for public network ids. This will go a long way to baselining the necessary perception of corporate authentication in public networks, instilling trust and confidence.

Once these corporate URLs are universal -- when they can be used within a company's enterprise IM solution and across public networks -- we will have the first essential stepping stone toward true interoperability. And we will have the biggest and largest companies to thank, since they will be the pioneers hammering out the financial deals with the networks to allow access to the networks.

My prediction is that the big three will rapidly find themselves in a bind, trying to keep track of all the cross-links and financial arrangements. Like the telephone carriers, there will quickly arise the need for some sort of clearing house for micro-payments based on the various 'calling plans' that enterprises have signed up for. It is likely that the three majors will create such a clearing house, or contract with existing clearing houses in the telephony space, to perform this vital function.

And of course, at that point, it will be simpler and more affordable for smaller companies and individuals to participate. But interoperability will cost something, and everyone -- businesses and individuals -- will have to pay. With hundreds of millions of users projected in the next few years, there is lots of money to be made, and the public networks are correctly not destabilizing that market, but are instead slowly evolving toward a for-fee 'premier' IM service that will make sense to sign up for in part because of the benefits of universal access, and this will be subsidized by the next wave of investments by the super large enterprises into real-time communication.