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> I really wonder how they dropped the ball. In my country, ICQ died when Microsoft started shipping MSN Messenger with Windows and worked hard to make people

> I really wonder how they dropped the ball. In my country, ICQ died when Microsoft started shipping MSN Messenger with Windows and worked hard to make people aware of it. (Microsoft even did a silly marketing campaign for MSN that involved a guy dressed as a butterfly). People used the Messenger that was already installed in their OS, and ICQ was history. I believe the same thing happened in most other countries, because it only took a couple of years for all the foreign ICQ buddies I had to move off to MSN.

drzaiusapelord 11y ago
I seem to have a different experience. Everyone migrated to Yahoo or AIM with MSN a distant third. In my social circle, yahoo was the king of chat for a very long time.
- anon4 11y ago
  We moved to Skype because of the end-to-end encryption, the group chats feature, the ability to talk and the network effect from others using it and us not wanting to use two clients at once. Oh, and with Skype file transfers would just work, while no ICQ client would ever let me initiate a file transfer to another person, or if it did, it would go though servers on the other end of the world.
- johnchristopher 11y ago
  Parent might be in Europe and you in the US. Back in those days that's how the IM market shares were roughly distributed among my peers.
  - rmsaksida 11y ago
    Yep. I'm in Brazil and the friends I mentioned are in Europe.
konart 11y ago
Well, ICQ was very popular up to 2005-2010. MSN was never a popular choice (in fact it was not popular at all). So people usually used ICQ, Skype and Jabber. Gmail+GTalk done the job killing ICQ for most here.
- angus_prune 11y ago
  MSN was the dominant messenger in pretty much the whole world apart from the US where Yahoo was dominant. In 2006 ComScore rated MSN having 61% of the world market and 90% in South America. Interestingly, Europe had far more messenger users than the US too. (all from here: http://betanews.com/2006/04/11/msn-messenger-most-used-im-client/ http://betanews.com/2006/04/11/msn-messenger-most-used-im-cl...)
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

drzaiusapelord 11y ago

I seem to have a different experience. Everyone migrated to Yahoo or AIM with MSN a distant third. In my social circle, yahoo was the king of chat for a very long time.

anon4 11y ago
We moved to Skype because of the end-to-end encryption, the group chats feature, the ability to talk and the network effect from others using it and us not wanting to use two clients at once. Oh, and with Skype file transfers would just work, while no ICQ client would ever let me initiate a file transfer to another person, or if it did, it would go though servers on the other end of the world.
johnchristopher 11y ago
Parent might be in Europe and you in the US. Back in those days that's how the IM market shares were roughly distributed among my peers.
- rmsaksida 11y ago
  Yep. I'm in Brazil and the friends I mentioned are in Europe.

konart 11y ago

Well, ICQ was very popular up to 2005-2010. MSN was never a popular choice (in fact it was not popular at all). So people usually used ICQ, Skype and Jabber. Gmail+GTalk done the job killing ICQ for most here.

angus_prune 11y ago
MSN was the dominant messenger in pretty much the whole world apart from the US where Yahoo was dominant. In 2006 ComScore rated MSN having 61% of the world market and 90% in South America. Interestingly, Europe had far more messenger users than the US too. (all from here: http://betanews.com/2006/04/11/msn-messenger-most-used-im-client/ http://betanews.com/2006/04/11/msn-messenger-most-used-im-cl...)
deleted 11y ago
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