No iChat on iPhone? Good!

It seems the announcement of AOL working on an iPhone version of AIM before Apple releases iChat Touch – so to speak – has a few commentators stumped. In fact, many are speculating that Apple is waiting until it can enable video and audio chat to release a shiny, crowd-pleasing iChat, once again leaving the AIM guy in the dust with a mouthful of gravel and skinned knees.

It seems to me, however, that this will not happen because it is not in Apple's interests. (I will put aside the many issues raised by the potential for audio chat over AIM to compete with Apple's own carrier arrangements and the fact any pleasing attempt at video iChat with an iPhone would require a significant hardware revamp, due to the absence of a front-facing camera.)

AOL has, for long, considered the Mac to be a fourth-class citizen. The Mac AIM client is notoriously horrendous, slow, cumbersome and Mac OS 9-like. Now, it exists because AIM needs it to. Politically, they need to claim cross-platform compatibility and, up until very recently, their own aging client used their own aging network much better than iChat - leading many users, including me, to use it as a backup application for those situations when iChat would not work. It also came with better AppleScript support than iChat which had me, well, stumped.

The good chat experience, however, was provided by iChat. Everybody knew that, including AOL, so what was the point in competing with Apple? I assume Apple's licensing agreements around the AIM protocols were enough to compensate for the "loss" of an ad-peddling client on what was, at the time, a minor platform for a company like AOL.

Things, however, have been reset with the iPhone. Apple is pushing it not as a "Mobile Mac," which it is, but as a brand new platform. That point was rammed down our throats again and again and again: software developers who spoke to us had never developed for the Mac, Apple was suddenly very concerned about the enterprise market, they had a great partnership with Microsoft. Almost all the codes were broken to show that the iPhone will not go the way of the Mac. The iPhone will not be a mere consumer toy for designers, the iPhone will be a major IT player.

Most significant to me was that Steve did not deliver most of the keynote. He appeared in good spirits and in good health, so far from me the thought of implying he is pushing out "successors" or showing that he is not the only man leading Apple - as has been speculated the first time he did that, a few years back. No, I think this was more of a way to get the iPhone to be introduced by people who would be listened to as "reasonable." Steve, of course, is very much reasonable, but the media tends to read a lot into what he says, what his real intentions are, etc. Often, more time is spent analyzing how Steve said things and what Steve meant than what he actually did say. Not so much with Phil and Scott, who are brilliant presenters in their own right, but have less of a jazzy aura and, therefore, were best suited to deliver a stern talk, matching all these enterprise and developer features.

By bringing AOL on board, Apple is bringing them back into its fold. Sure, it's for the iPhone, not for the Mac. But re-kindling the relationship between both companies, this time around a widely successful platform, means that Apple and AOL are once again working together on an official client.

Sure, the iPhone is not the Mac. Sure, Apple's contracts with AOL probably mean they do not need to worry too much about the future of iChat – I expect there is some expectation of continuity in the compatibility of iChat with AOL's protocol updates for the foreseeable future. But iChat, which is a key component of Mac OS X and of the Mac experience as a whole, still depends on AOL in a very large part – because users get introduced to all what iChat has to offer through AIM chat.

So for Apple to rely on AIM to develop a chat client for the iPhone is a stroke of genius. They could write iChat Touch, sure, but why bother when it is obviously in AOL's best interests to make it happen and especially when it could have a positive influence on other product lines? AIM for iPhone certainly cannot be ported to the Mac and it seems that AOL has indicated renewed interest for Mac OS X as of late, if only because of the platform's substantial growth. Such relationships, however, take much nurturing and the iPhone experiment seems to be a prime example of that.

Of course, the announcement we European users are waiting for is MSN Messenger for the iPhone. AIM in France? Unknown or nearly so. And the day MSN arrives on the iPhone I may open a Hotmail account, just to celebrate.