Well of course to us, it "makes sense" to interoperate with Facebook (we hate having to keep the browser open during a FB chat), but Windows Live Messenger has been a notoriously closed system in the past, so we’re not sure it will make sense to Microsoft. However if it means losing customers who find themselves using Facebook Chat more and Windows Live Messenger less, that may change. We should be hearing more about the Windows Live Platform later this year, so maybe there’s hope that Facebook Chat may be part of that "major focus".

Windows Live participates in an industry defined by change. Consumer choice is continually expanding with new services launching almost daily. To this end, with Windows Live and Messenger, we are making it easier for consumers to integrate contacts, communications and sharing across the multitude of internet services they want to use. We'll interoperate where it makes sense, as we've done with Yahoo! and customers of Office Communications Server. We'll continue to invest in contact portability and identity standards, as we've done with our contacts APIs. And we'll integrate feeds, as we've done with over 75 top web services in the last year. This will continue to be a major focus going forward.

For the sake of argument, assume that you have a cell phone and you're subscribed to Carrier A. You then wish to call, or send a message to, a friend who happens to be a subscriber of Carrier B. Naturally, you would expect your messages to get across, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to keep in touch and your provider would be severely restricting you to their network.

Well, this is not the case when it comes to Instant Messaging (IM) Services like MSN and Yahoo because they're not standard. In order to communicate with other people, all members must be part of the same network, and this means that if the network goes down (and it does more than anyone’s liking), everybody goes down with it!

Historically, IM has existed on closed and proprietary systems, with dedicated clients that can only connect to a single network. For many years users with accounts on multiple networks (say, AOL and MSN), would have to keep multiple programs open, which ate up system resources and cluttered desktops. By 2000 a handful of clients emerged that would allow users to manage multiple IM accounts from a single program. These stayed largely under the radar until 2002, when a client called Trillian hit 1 million downloads (and then jumped to 5 million six months later).

IM is also ripe for innovation, but developers have been hampered by a near-complete lack of cooperation from the major IM networks. Perhaps developers will take advantage of the growing number of networks that are open, adding new features that make them attractive to users still stuck on the old behemoths. Then Yahoo and Microsoft might be compelled to finally change - or perish.