A poorly researched article on IM in the workplace
In the Newsweek article, "
You 'pinging' me?", Jennifer Tanaka discusses the use of instant messaging in the workplace. The article talks about the fact all most IM usage at work is done without the knowledge (or approval) of the IT department. Unfortunately, it appears that little research was done for the article. In one instance, Tanaka cites a consultant as an example of someone who has downloaded and uses all 4 of the major IM programs: "
But because these networks don’t talk to each other, he needs to maintain all four programs." While the first part of that sentence is correct, the latter part is incorrect. There are a number of IM programs available that can communicate with others on all 4 networks. An example is the
Trillian IM client, which I begun using recently -- you still need accounts on all 4 IM networks, but you can use this single program to send and receive instant messages with people on all 4 networks. Another example of the lack or research is the fact that
Jabber was not mentioned at all in the article. The article talks about about how AOL and MSN are launching products to address the enterprise IM market, but no mention of Jabber, one of the leading software makers in that space. Jabber is not a tiny startup that the author could have easily overlooked.
Jabber's customers include large companies such as BellSouth, HP, and Walt Disney. Furthermore, when you do a Google search for "
instant messaging", guess who is currently in the number 7 spot? Not only that, Trillian falls into the number 15 spot. The point is, it would have been really easy to do some proper research for this article. By the way, as an experiment, I have sent a shortened version of the above comments to Newsweek. I have never tried this before -- we'll see if I get a response...
