These two really deserve each other. And I'm not talking about people, I'm talking about companies. I guess this marriage is more similar to mail order brides than a partnership. Microsoft is looking to purchase AOL, according to this article. Well, more accurately, Time Warner wants to sell AOL to them.

Frankly, Microsoft can have 'em! I wonder how much worse they could get. My real question is this: if Microsoft owns MSN Messenger, and AOL owns AIM and ICQ, what's going to happen to the instant messaging world when Microsoft owns three out of four of the major services (yahoo being, in my opinion, the fourth). I know this concern is silly in most peoples' eyes, but to me it's ever important as instant messaging is a very common and often critical service holding families and businesses together all over the world. It's bigger than just a toy now.

Now let's take this a step farther. iChat users AIM. .mac uses AIM. While Microsoft would do well to make AIM the standard since it's the biggest out there anyway, they could also squash a competitor by making MSN the standard all three clients merge into. Furthermore, will they let people make open source MSN clients? Unlikely. Though you do have GAIM. Still, this could bode badly for the instant messaging community.

Of course there are plenty of other concerns, but if I wrote about them what would the other bloggers have to talk about?