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As you may remember, AOL and Yahoo! closed down their Enterprise IM a few weeks ago. It looks like they got a good deal from Microsoft: instead of having to create and support their own infrastructure, MS will just allow their clients to talk to their IM Server, and:

Microsoft will pay AOL and Yahoo a royalty for connecting to LCS. The companies declined to elaborate on whether these payments will be based on the number of LCS users connecting to AOL and Yahoo.

You have to think this setup made it easier for the biz people to tank their own IM servers. Now, instead of taking on the risk of creating and marketing their own IM servers, they can concentrate on their "public" IM clients. The more people that use the public clients, the more money they make from the MS IM Server. Seems like a good deal to me.

For Microsoft, it helps get over the tipping-point hurdle of IM in the Enterprise: there's a certain number of people you need using compatible IM before it's useful (and worth paying for). That is, if you have 1000 workers, and 1/3 of them use AOL, a 1/3 of them use MSN, and a 1/3 of them use Yahoo!, IM's not really that useful. No one's going to want to lay out the cash for an IM server that only works for a 1/3 of your people.

But, if all of those clients (or a majority of them) can interoperate, you can get actual value from paying for the server. And, of course, there's all sorts of other features you can build into applications (like Office), e.g.,:

if Outlook's calendar shows a person in a meeting, it can route voice calls to that person's cell phone. Or, if someone sends an IM to a user, the software can then prompt a Net phone call and record a voice message.

Again, if only a 1/3 of your people can benefit from this, when a sales rep is trying to sell you on Office 2050 with this feature, you'll say "so what, Office 2000 works fine, no need to upgrade." But, if everyone can benefit, then it's a much better selling point.

Anyhow, point being: it seems like a shrewd move, for all parties involved, to allow their IM's to interoperate. I guess it's one of those "everyone can benefit from the stupid network" things.