Messenger, Instantly

How could I run a blog without even mentioning Instant Messenger? I don’t know.

Am I becoming an expert on the matter? I have been working on this off and on since 2000, when Marshall T. Rose first started talking about his beloved BEEP (back then still BXXP) and a new generation of IM products and protocols. He was getting excited, sat down a while with a bunch of smart nerds, and there you are, out comes IMXP (soon to be renamed APEX). Marshall is an incredible man. Once he decides he is going to revolutionize the world, there is no stopping him – even if his revolution is not really what the world wants.

But there you are, I got in touch with IM. And a few years later, I got a chance to work on it again, this time for Yahoo!. The company that made the Internet, as one might say, had a wonderful IM product, but no money streaming out of it. Somehow it felt like a labor of love for the beloved users, no money attached.

And now here I am, trying to get enterprises to spend millions of dollars for a product they basically could have for free. Hard to believe, but we got something going, and we are pretty much where we want to ship.

This, in a nutshell, is Marco and IM. From the ancient days of IRC to modern day webcam traffic.