Microsoft may leave Mac users out of messaging plans

Stan Beer
Saturday, 15 July 2006 19:57

IT Industry - Strategy

An interesting piece of information to come out of the Microsoft and Yahoo messaging alliance is the news that Microsoft is still evaluating whether to include the Mac version of Windows Live Messenger in its interoperability plans.

Frankly this does not really come as a surprise. Microsoft has always deliberately kept its IM releases for Mac users behind releases for their Windows counterparts.

Just think about it. You’re a teenage Mac user and most of your friends are Windows users. They all talk to each other at night after school using Windows Live Messenger (or MSN Messenger as it was once called).

You can text message your friends but can’t talk to them because your version of MSN Messenger doesn’t support voice. You feel left out so despite the fact that you like your Mac, you ditch it for whatever price you can get on eBay and replace it with a cheap white box Windows PC.

This might seem like a way out story but I can assure you it’s true. It happened in my family. My son wanted to stay connected with his friends and they were using PCs and MSN Messenger. Never mind that his iMac was ten times the computer that their PCs were.

Of course, the advent of Intel Macs that can run Windows has changed this. The problem could also go away with the fact that Yahoo Messenger runs on Macs and that’s supposedly going to be interoperable with Windows Live Messenger, although from early reports we’re a long way from a finished product.

Or if you really wanted to take a bold step, you could tell your friends to use Skype which runs on Mac, Windows and Linux equally well. That’s just an opinion of course and, no, they don’t advertise and didn’t pay us to say that.