[LINK] "The Rise and Fall of AIM, the Breakthrough AOL Never Wanted"

[rfmcdonald]

I still have AOL Instant Messenger installed on my laptop, though these days I use it much more for an add-on that lets it interact with Facebook Chat than to talk to the few others who remain online in the AIM domain. Mashable's Jason Abruzzese has a great extended interview with the engineers who developed the software, suggesting that AIM was hobbled by being too ahead of its time at a company too invested in the status quo.

Barry Appelman, Eric Bosco and Jerry Harris worked at AOL in the 1990s and early 2000s as engineers on AOL Instant Messenger, known commonly as AIM. They weren't hired to build a messenger. Appelman and Bosco programmed in the Unix operating system. Harris had been a programmer at a small web browser company purchased by AOL.

But together with a group of other engineers they helped take AIM from inception to dominance, then watched it fall into dormancy, unable to convince AOL management that free was the future.

Sitting with them and talking about the program, they exude pride for what they built and how it impacted the Internet. That pride is accompanied by a sense of "what if?"

During our conversation, the term "innovator's dilemma" is thrown around a few times.

Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen coined the term, which is the title of his renowned book. The concept is simple — companies concerned with its current products, profits and customers often fail to recognize and adapt to change even from within.

Whatsapp is not far from their minds. That comes up a couple times as well. The app, which Facebook bought for $16 billion, is essentially what they worked on in the mid 90s — messaging over the Internet.

AOL is still pivoting away from its days as an ISP. Under the leadership of Tim Armstrong it now focuses on video and its ad network. In another life, before a disastrous acquisition of Time Warner, it brought the Internet into the homes of Americans and controlled the program that popularized online messaging without ever really meaning to.

It would be easier to call AIM ahead of its time if it had not become so wildly popular almost immediately after its launch. In many ways, AIM was right in line with the times, just at a company hanging on to a business model that would soon become obsolete.