Carl Tyler's Blog

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As many of you know I've been working with Instant Messaging for many years, and last year started along with Peyton Instant Technologies. When we first started Instant we would speak to many media analysts and journalist about what we were doing and would often get a blank stare back, as they were purely thinking of Instant Messaging as a consumer play, yes there is a .94 probably that business journalists are the last people on the planet to spot a new market,

OK so that is a dig at companies like Gartner who's predictions are normally as far as I can tell, way off the mark. I remember one time they came to present to us on the use of NCs in 1997, predicting with .8 probably that by 2002 something like 25% of business users would be using an NC, at the time I laughed pretty had, and it still makes me laugh now. One of my concerns is that these folks are probably giving IBM some similar spin on Workplace, saying we predict with a probability of .88 that by 2010 85% of people will be using Workplace to access applications and Microsoft Office and Windows will be part of history. The key thing that customers of companies like Gartner forget is that these folks are just guessing too, sure you can perform market analysis and extrapolate out figures, but much of it is still guessing.

So back to Instant Messaging and the media coverage, so I was wondering why the media is suddenly starting to understand the value IM in a business scenario and I think there is one key reason, Microsoft, this may seem a strange thing to say when IBM has been in the corporate IM space for so long, but Microsoft entering a market gives it a great deal of validity. Microsoft, if you look at history always enters markets late, it typically waits for a significant market to exist before entering it, and then uses it's other products to seed the new product into the market. By Microsoft now entering this market, it is clear that there is a market, and customers are willing to embrace the technology for business usage (as if we didn't know that already).

Now my personal hope is that Microsoft entering the market will light a fire under IBM, and make them realize they need to start innovating with Sametime again, for the last few releases Sametime has felt very much like maintenance releases, we're ready to see some innovations again folks! At worst I hope IBM dedicates some more resources to the Sametime development and marketing teams, I know from my experience speaking to the Sametime developers they are totally swamped and struggle day to day with their huge to do lists, and we all know this is not a good thing when the job market picks up.

So with the market coverage picking up I feel like Instant Technologies is definitely in the right place, which I can tell you over the last few months there have been times we wondered if we were too early.

In case anyone was wondering I could have easily put a picture of a hot girl for this blog entry as Instant Messaging is hot hot hot!