Instant Messaging alliance

One of the consequences of eBay acquiring Skype is that announcement made today by Yahoo! and Microsoft: the two instant messaging software operated by the two companies are going to be made inter-operable, meaning that a user of Yahoo Messenger will be able to "see" a MSN Messenger user and chat with him.

The two companies are feeling the pressure from Google Talk and Skype which led to that alliance as reported in this article. That's a good move, at least for the customers and actually, they should use a common interface so that users do not have to download and install 3 or even 4 different programs.