MSN Messenger, soon to be Windows Messenger, has established a dominant position in Australia, unlike the US where AOL Instant Messenger retains its leading position, according to a recent review of instant messaging (IM) in Australia by Jupiter Media Metrix (JMM).
In terms of -at home" users, MSN Messenger has achieved -robust growth" over the last year with 2,559,000 unique users being reported by JMM in October this year, compared to 441,000 in March 2000. However, MSN's growth comes to the detriment of AOL's ICQ, which saw unique users fall to 1,633,000 in October 2001, compared to 1,715,000 in March of the previous year. At the height of its popularity in August 2000, ICQ Applications hit 2,498,000 unique users. MSN Messenger surpassed ICQ in terms of unique users in March 2001, since which time unique users of the ICQ service have been on the decline, according to JMM figures.
-Primarily, in the US AOL is the dominant player with a very large share of the ISP market," JMM senior analyst Andrew Sergeant told ZDNet Australia. -Outside of the US, Microsoft doesn't have anything like that competition...it's been a real success story." However, -it really surprised us to see ICQ heading down," Sergeant added.
In comparison, leading contender in the US AOL Instant Messenger, and small fry Yahoo Messenger have relatively small user bases in Australia.
AOL Instant Messenger has seen unique users on the decline since August 2000 when 555,000 marked its peak, in October 2001 there were 348,000 unique users of the AOL service, and Yahoo Messenger had 512,000 unique users last month, compared with 272,000 in March 2000 and a peak of 555,000 in August of the same year, according to JMM figures.
According to Jupiter Media Metrix, growth in the popularity of MSN Messenger is likely to continue mainly because Windows Messenger is one of the key delivery mechanisms for the services offered as part of Microsoft's .NET strategy and is bundled with Microsoft's new OS, Windows XP.
-This will boost uptake further and will expand the utility of the application," JMM senior analyst David Stewart Hunter said.
"Like the browser wars, MSN Messenger is likely to become the single dominant messaging application in many places. This will happen even more quickly than IE established dominance in the browser wars because the network effects are much stronger with communications applications," Stewart-Hunter added.
Whilst JMM's sample size of -at work" users wasn't sufficient to include in its recent review of IM services in Australia, it anticipates the uptake of MSN Messenger in the workplace to be more rapid than it has proved to be in the home.
-I think there are a lot of benefits of IM in the workplace," Sergeant said. -There are signs that IT managers are getting behind it plus MSN is more secure and has a lot of benefits as a productivity application."
Australian users of messaging applications spend an average of 22 percent of their time online, using one of the four major IM applications during August 2001, and users spent an average of two hours and 51 minutes using IM services during the month of October 2001, compared to just over two hours in March 2000, according to Jupiter Media Metrix.
Although MSN clearly has the larger user base, MSN, ICQ and Yahoo have grouped together in terms of average minutes used per month -- with users averaging two hours and eight minutes, one hour and 53 minutes and two hours, nine minutes in October respectively - AOL Instant Messenger users averaged just 46 minutes in the same month.
