We need to support communication between communities while protecting large companies' confidential directory information. That's what it takes to make this technology fit for business.
The fact that AOL and Microsoft are moving in the same direction is good for everybody.
The security aspects are extremely important to enterprises. We need to make sure those are properly dealt with. We also need to have user-level control so that presence information is only available to certain people.
As large business use comes into play here, we're going to have more and more pressure to go to open standards.