I don’t like speculative posts. It’s easy to come up with the perfect solution, and outline it in a blog post. Thousands of people have figured out how to fix the financial crisis, and how to perfect health care- if only the president would read their blog. There’s no shortage of “How to save” posts. The newspaper industry, the music industry, Yahoo!- the list goes on and on. And even when these ideas do pass a speculative stage, and get backed by proper research, they still don’t always work out- such as EBay buying Skype, Google buying Dodgeball and Jaiku, or Time Warner merging with AOL.
The beauty of speculative posts is that they can’t be proven wrong. That’s also their downfall- they’re too easy to do. After all, it’s easy to justify on paper, when millions of dollars aren’t at stake.
That being said, here I go. Here is my suggestion on how to save Instant Messaging.