And they're making money on IM right now? Shyeah, right.

The only money they're making is imaginary money, by saying "people sign up and pay for our service because of our superior proprietary IM system". They're justifying it now, hoping that one day it'll turn around and that their advertising revenues will eventually begin turning a profit, but that'll never happen. We've already seen the bottom fall out of the internet advertising market.

When are companies going to realize that the only way to succeed with communications networks is to have open standards? Proprietary systems have always collapsed under their own weight. Chrissakes, people, this is communication we're talking about here. How do you expect people to communicate if you lock them out?