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It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were wor

by tinco 6y ago

It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were worth billions. It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management textbooks, but who knows. Anyone got a good explanation why it made sense to shut down these services?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ThePhysicist 6y ago
I think it's as you said, corporations didn't recognize the economic value of chat platforms back then. I think they were mostly focused on "Web 2.0" stuff so they probably tried putting all of their resources into that. You often see companies axe perfectly good business units just because they have a slightly lower margin or contribution to overall revenue, as they think putting the people from those units into the "cash cow" units will be better for the profit line (and it often is). We can see Google doing this over and over: They actually create a lot of nice products that could be profitable on their own, but since the main Google products are just making much more money per employee it still makes sense for them to axe the small "winning products" and have almost everyone work on the big winners.
- a-dub 6y ago
  I think AIM is a little different... It was born out of the original AOL dial-up walled garden service where they built a bridge to the Internet where people could download standalone clients and communicate with themselves and old school AOL subscribers. I don't know the internals, but I do know that much of the original AOL backend existed at least through the early 2000s which provided the instant messenger and authentication services [0]. It wouldn't surprise me if they were shutting down all of that infrastructure which I'm sure had a non-trivial cost to operate. I think the thing to keep in mind is that running centralized backend infrastructure (ie; store and forward, user state, directory) for an instant messaging service is not cheap and if the platform is open and allows for user supplied clients, there's almost zero direct monetization opportunity without stepping into unethical privacy breach territory. That means they're relegated to just pushing a brand, and it seems like a very expensive way to do that. Moreover, AOL transitioned in its later years into a digital journalism company, and as far as I know AOL itself as a consumer brand disappeared. [0] Worked on a whitebox set top box browser platform (ala Android) in the early 00s specifically with AOL as a client. Amusingly, the big feature they were trying to push was onscreen chatrooms for people who were watching the same thing live, which I guess if you think about it may have led to ways to monetize chat.
  - icedchai 6y ago
    Too bad they didn't open source it. I'm sure most of the costs were in the employees required to operate and maintain the system. I am skeptical the infrastructure itself was that expensive, unless they were forced to keep it running on obsolete hardware. 90's tech is generally pretty light weight...
    - deaddodo 6y ago
      > unless they were forced to keep it running on obsolete hardware. If you read blog posts and the like from people involved in those projects (MSN Messenger and AIM/ICQ, specifically); the companies would take advantage of protocol updates or other scheduled downtime to failover to newer hardware. So I doubt they were ever stuck on any “obsolete hardware”.
      - a-dub 6y ago
        AOL launched around 1991 if I recall. I remember watching with great interest (I think I may have been in some kind of beta program) as it was obvious (at least to me at the time) that digital communications with a graphical UI was the future. (At the time in the US, there were a few commercial information services that were textual, General Electric Network Information Exchange and CompuServe were the big ones... followed by Prodigy which basically looked like teletext or a Bloomberg terminal for the home- it was clear that something better could be done, which ended up being AOL). The original AOL client shipped for DOS with Digital Research's GEM widget kit, it wouldn't surprise me if they used additional DR hardware and software on the backend (VAX anyone?). When I worked on the AOL project, I would see e-mails from AOL ops (from AOL screen names, no less!) about how they would take scary and unique sounding things like "access rotors" down, so I suspect that given how early the launch was, the backend was extremely bespoke simply because they were making things up as they went along in order to launch a new and unique thing. It wouldn't surprise me one bit to learn that it ran on VAX, HP3000, AS/400 or perhaps something even older and larger. You didn't hear about horizontal scaling nearly as much back then, most scaling consisted of "buy a bigger computer."
- josephg 6y ago
  > We can see Google doing this over and over: They actually create a lot of nice products that could be profitable on their own, but since the main Google products are just making much more money per employee it still makes sense for them to axe the small "winning products" and have almost everyone work on the big winners. Even 10 years ago they've been very explicit about this strategy internally. Management talks about it as "putting more wood behind fewer arrows". Its somewhat self reinforcing. I didn't try Google Inbox because I was sure it would be axed in a couple years anyway. (And I was right.) The more people make that same assumption, the fewer people try anything new from Google. And the worse any new products' metrics are - which in turn makes google axe more otherwise good products.
  - george3d6 6y ago
    You may not be the target audience though, the target audience are probably people that aren't yet "bough into" the google ecosystem. So they are unaware of this axing policy. Anyone logging into chromium, using gmail and google calendar and an android device is already "theirs". What they want is to increase the share of people that are in the MS ecosystem (and presumably also OSX ecosystem, but that's mostly a status signaling thing, so the strategy there is probably different).
    - addicted 6y ago
      You will be surprised how many people are indeed aware of Google’s axing policy, if not even consciously. The reality is that so many of them have been burnt by Google. Picasa was an extremely popular photo management platform used by many. Google Play Music was extremely popular. Google Plus was not exactly popular but touched nearly every Google user, was highly promoted, and then disappeared. And then you come to the massive list of chat and calling apps that Google has arbitrarily spun up, promoted, and then killed. But even if we go with the idea that regular people are unaware of Google’s tendency, even subconsciously, there’s also the fact that the way most products become popular is through a smaller subset of influencers. And tech influencers, almost necessarily, are almost certainly aware of googles tendencies.
- soneca 6y ago
  I see Google also axing small winners in order to have people working on big bets. Undermining and then axing Orkut and then trying to create Google+ never made sense to me. A lot of non-brazilians non-indians (that didn’t use or even knew Orkut) defended the decision at the time, but I think history showed it was a bad bet.
  - tinco 6y ago
    For sure, I think directors simply didn't understand how online communities worked. Facebook must have been the first company to fully realise this, buying both Instagram and WhatsApp but not attempting to internalize their communities under the Facebook brand. It would've been pure capital destruction if they had done that. I'm pretty sure they're going to have to write off the whatsapp investment. At least Instagram has a viable standalone business model. They'll lose the Whatsapp userbase at the drop of a hat, and it's already hard to monetize to begin with.
    - selestify 6y ago
      As someone who doesn't understand either, how do online communities work?
      - loopz 6y ago
        You build something addictive and "social". Now how you sell user data is the Billion dollar question.
  - ridaj 6y ago
    I wouldn't romanticize Orkut. It wasn't that great and I think Facebook would've steamrolled it all the same, much as it did numerous other regional social networks around the world.
    - soneca 6y ago
      I think the causality is that it was not great because Google did not care about improving it. So it got stuck in time and then Facebook kept improving. Even a strategy of copying Facebook’s innovations (like FB does in Instagram and WhatsApp) would an improvement. Of course we will never know, but I think that betting on Orkut would have a better chance of facing Facebook than starting from scratch with Google+
agumonkey 6y ago
Another point of surprise is that these things grew somehow organically. Nobody went onto AIM or MSN because it's gonna revolutionize anything, it was just a simple need, simple programs.. no biggie. They're gone and now it's replaced by things that try to be grandiose and keep changing every year (or die ala Google) because the big new model is not right and they have a new big idea to chase.
- xwolfi 6y ago
  Well there is a big innovation in the business model, something MS missed, that the internet could be cheap on good phones and that chat apps could replace expensive SMSes. In fact, in France where SMS were free very early,whatsapp failed to pierce for much longer than elsewhere to a point the EU blamed our telecom companies from blocking innovation by being too cheap. MSN was a stupid senseless loss for a long while nonetheless, even in France, as Facebook took time to regrow the networks already made via MSN.
  - unethical_ban 6y ago
    >the EU blamed our telecom companies from blocking innovation by being too cheap. A source would be nice, but I completely believe it - and it's infuriating. "The government is so effective, capitalists have nothing to improve in order to line their pockets!" It's what the GOP wants to do to municipal broadband service in the US.
forgotmypw17 6y ago
Generally speaking, they were shut down because they were designed in a way that they were centrally controlled by one entity which had the ability to shut them down, just like that.
- dmingod666 6y ago
  Discord, google chat, WhatsApp slack, Telegram, MsTeams, almost all commonly used chat clients are centrally managed..
  - olivierestsage 6y ago
    Yes, and they work fine for now, but their long-term viability is far from guaranteed for this reason.
    - dmingod666 6y ago
      On a lighter note, "In the long term, we are all dead"
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
meerita 6y ago
Truth is, there were chances to renew, rebuild, ressurrect old messaging ecosystems, like ICQ but they sucked so bad it's really hard to take chance.
- adrianN 6y ago
  It was a golden age of instant messaging. You could talk to anybody on any network because multiprotocol clients just worked. I basically gave up on instant messaging because every company now digs deeper and deeper moats around their network.
Jenk 6y ago
They failed to monetise them. Most chat clients were placing ads to try and generate revenue but I doubt they ever made money from it. From what I remember of the blogs at the time, such as Martin Fowler's stuff on Yahoo! Messenger, the infrastructure was far from cheap, and the protocols were really insecure, too. I think Facebook was hoovering up a shitton of the messenger traffic very quickly, too, and the traffic on AIM/MSN/etc was dominated by crappy bots sending phishing links. All in all it wasn't a happy place and I doubt many actually missed them. This is the first link I've personally seen about the nostalgia of IM anyway.
- xenihn 6y ago
  AIM was profitable until the day that it was shut down.
  - sillysaurusx 6y ago
    How?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Macha 6y ago
      A lot of ads and not very much ongoing development. I'm not sure "until the day it was shut down" is totally correct though. AOL were moving from their own data centers to AWS at that stage and AIM was one of the last apps left in, so I find it hard to believe that AIM would still have shown green near the end if the data center costs were spread across the services using them (we didn't have a chargeback model in those days). I think the decision (I worked at AOL at the time, but far from AIM) to shut it down came down to: 1. There was no dedicated dev team 2. Consequently the tech was old and not up to then modern security practices 3. Even aside from security, it used a lot of in-house tech that other more actively maintained products like mail had migrated from and newer products never used. 4. Lots of the software it used like OS versions were going EOL 5. It needed an AWS migration as the data center was shutting down. 6. It didn't fit with the strategic direction (which was to use revenue from legacy but shrinking businesses like dialup/search/mail to pivot to owned content as a USP/headline piece for the adtech business) So someone had to make a cost/benefit analysis of shutting it down versus investing enough to bring it up to speed and that's before you even consider the user facing improvements that would have been needed to reclaim market share from Facebook and Skype. Also number 1 for the user facing improvements would have been "less ads, less intrusive ads" which also would have hurt revenue.
culopatin 6y ago
I’m still pissed that MSN Messenger died but the hot garbage of Skype continued. I wish the pick for in org chat was MSN and not Skype. Back in 2004 we had chat history, now MS had to come up with the behemoth of Teams to provide that feature. All we needed was msn on Android and iPhone with cloud backup of chats, that’s if.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Don't worry, they ruined Skype too. It used to be great and the P2P nature of it meant that file transfer speed, call quality & reliability was down to your network connection, something that you can control and fix should it be bad. The clients also used to be beautiful, both on Windows and Mac. They replaced both with an Electron abomination.
  - causality0 6y ago
    Don't forget that if you accidentally merged your Microsoft account with your old Skype account you could lose all the contacts. I lost several gaming buddies that way when I didn't have alternate contact info.
- brmgb 6y ago
  Lync was MSN and was fairly popular and Skype for business was an evolution of the Lync client not the Skype client. So Microsoft did actually pick MSN. They just kept the stronger brand. Also it always had chat history. Teams is a different beast and a natural evolution. It's mostly centered around meetings and group chat which makes sense because that's what pro users actually want.
  - mjcl 6y ago
    Skype for Business / Lync was originally called Office Communicator and has always used SIP for client/server communications.
everdrive 6y ago
If AOL or MSN had figured out how to monetize these platforms, they would have ruined them anyhow. They would have been lost in a different way.
- Macha 6y ago
  At least here the move to MSN to Facebook was largely driven by the move to monetise it more. More ads, more features which existed to give them places to show ads (I seem to remember it opening a today screen with news feeds at one point, think they did a twitter style thing with status updates too? Or was that imo?). The pull factor was everyone was on Facebook but the monetisation changes were a big push factor too
mrfusion 6y ago
What’s the story behind that? You’re right, that’s astounding.
brmgb 6y ago
> It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were worth billions. > It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management textbooks, but who knows. It's not short sightedness. It was perfectly reasonnable to close these plateforms (in so much as they were closed - Microsoft folded MSN into the Lync and Skype brands and rather successfully sold it to pro users). They were never going to make money with them as they were. You are just missing that modern instant messassing plateforms have little in common with AIM and MSN. If you look at what is valuable today, you have on one side WeChat and Whatsapp who took over the mobile space and are extremely valuable in emerging countries where text messaging became the main point of entry for conducting business and mobile payments. On the other side, you have Slack which use is centered around chat rooms and collaboration rather than direct messaging and whose popularity grew mainly on the shifting habits of a generation used to communicate via text, habits taken on smartphones. Then again, Microsoft was quick to reuse the infrastructure they already had to launch Teams which is very successful. So, unless you could foresee the emergence of a mobile first world, it completely made sense to pivot these services towards paying customers.
- grumple 6y ago
  It would not have been very difficult to pivot AIM into making money. First you add social media style profiles, then ads, then integrations, then feeds... none of this would have relied on mobile. Facebook didn't rely on mobile for many years after formation - the iPhone came out a couple of years after facebook did, and it took a few more years before smartphones saturated the market. Of course, it's easy to say this today having seen the result. But aol in particular was familiar with ad-driven business; they should have had the appropriate resources to anticipate the potential of their businesses.
  - cmonagle 6y ago
    It's worth noting that AIM did make several attempts to integrate social media features, admittedly a bit late (the same year Facebook launched Chat). https://mashable.com/2008/05/19/aim-bebo-integration/ https://mashable.com/2008/05/19/aim-bebo-integration/
Spooky23 6y ago
Agreed. AOL in particular pioneered stuff like E2E encryption, etc. imo, the early 2000s platforms like AIM, Yahoo, MSN were the pinnacle of the technology, and successors are all worse in material ways. Today, iMessage is probably the best single messaging platform, which is pitiful because it has key design and UX flaws. I think in the case of AIM, it existed by virtue of and thrived under corporate neglect. The others withered as the complimentary services withered (Yahoo) or the corporate strategies shifted in inscrutable ways (Microsoft, Google). It was a weird scenario where MS and Goog behaved similarly... Microsoft with their mysterious purchase and subsequent neglect of Skype and Google with their drunken monkey product management process.
- easton 6y ago
  What are your UX flaws with iMessage? The reason why I like it is because it’s got good UX (except when a message doesn’t send for no reason), but if there’s something I’m missing out on in other messenger apps...
  - tantalor 6y ago
    As an Android user, the most obvious flaw of iMessage is incompatibility.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
    I'd say not being able to message ~85% of smartphone users is a pretty big UX flaw.
    - ulfw 6y ago
      That's not bad UX. That's a product limitation (a conscious one I might say).
      - Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
        This 'product limitation' makes user experience worse. Actually, it makes it unusable for most users. Whether this limitation is intentional is irrelevant, the UX is still bad.
numair 6y ago
Imagine there was an AOL executive in charge of AIM, and that Mark Zuckerberg offered the guy hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Facebook stock to hobble efforts to keep the platform relevant. Sounds like a totally crazy conspiracy theory, right? After all, it would have been totally obviously suspicious if someone made hundreds of millions of dollars by simply jumping from one middle-management role to another, right?
- mikeodds 6y ago
  Are you referencing someone specific here?
- polynomial 6y ago
  Even if those rumors are true (and no one has ever seen fit to publish them, so there's that) it wasn't just a single executive that killed AIM, it was multiple points of failure, including keeping it ad-free, which meant it pretty much existed outside AOL's revenue ecosystem, out on its own. And when Appelman & team released their open source version, that was akin to declaring a mutiny at anti-OSS AOL. Products need internal champions, without which, it doesn't take a conspiracy to kill them, they will just atrophy on their own.
  - jaywalk 6y ago
    It's obviously been a long time so my memory could be faulty, but I distinctly remember ads in AIM and installing cracked versions of the client that removed the ads.
    - Macha 6y ago
      Yeah, in the last few years there was a big permanent ad at the footer of the contact list, plenty of ads in the web client and I think at one point there were sidebar ads in chat (that last one could have been msn)
      - polynomial 6y ago
polynomial 6y ago
AIM shutdown on Dec 15, 2017. This doesn't seem all that short sighted to me. More like legally blind.
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
On the contrary, social media and messaging platforms live on trend popularity alone. Features or bulk accounts ever created are mostly meaningless. MySpace stopped mattering once everyone moved to Facebook. These aren't driven by technology, they're driven solely by popularity. Once people move on, you might as well shut it down.
- after_care 6y ago
  Microsoft rebranded MSN to Lync, Skype and finally to Teams. AIM could have rebranded with the right product team behind it.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    And lost users every time. Also, you've merged a lot of unrelated products. MSN was folded into Skype after they bought Skype, a separate company. Lync, a corporate offering with no commonality with MSN, got rebranded Skype for Business, despite no actual relation or compatibility with Skype. Teams has nothing in common with either of the previously described product lines, though Microsoft is going to sunset SfB and push everyone over to Teams, given the success of that product. Renaming Lync as Skype for Business is actually the only "rebrand" Microsoft did here, and it did nothing to actually increase adoption of that platform, considering Microsoft chose to dump it less than five years later.
u801e 6y ago
And these messaging platforms did not require an exorbitant amount of computing resources to run. They were responsive to keyboard input (no signficant lag), and, as I recall, allowed one to keep a local log of messages sent and received.
sombremesa 6y ago
Reminds me of the time I read about someone inheriting six figures worth of Apple shares from their grandparents (who had an excellent cost basis, of course) and immediately selling it all to 'diversify'. It's not always easy to understand the long term benefits of holding on to 'risky' positions, and conventional 'wisdom' often steers you away from it.
- raldi 6y ago
  Wouldn’t this be equivalent to someone who inherited six figures in cash and failed to immediately use all of it to purchase Apple shares?
  - tinco 6y ago
    This is the opposite, the big companies closed their messaging platforms because they wanted to shed low performing departments and consolidate, instead of maintaining them and keep attempting to make them florish which would be a form of diversification.
    - raldi 6y ago
      Right. And the analogy also fails because buying Apple shares is as easy as selling them; what makes the destruction of all the original IM platforms so dumb is that it's a one-way move. Once you shut one down, there's no Ctrl-Z.
- roland35 6y ago
  I think that was the correct call - hindsight is always easier to identify great stocks! In 2010, before I believed in index funds, I had an extra $1k and I was debating to put it in AAPL or this new thing I heard of called bitcoin. I ended up buying apple, and sold it after it doubled thinking I did great... Certainly not a bad outcome but it just goes to show how hard it is to predict anything.
sandworm101 6y ago
>> People miss AIM I miss how anyone with a packet sniffer could pull entire AIM messages out of the air. Just filter by port number and you could read them like a live chat window. I demonstrated this to a class while at law school. Scared the heck out of everyone who had been using it to pass answers to people when they were called on. (Failure to give a reasonable answer would impact your grade very quickly.)
loopz 6y ago
I think the true answer is pretty cut & dry: They didn't sell your data to everyone.
GuB-42 6y ago
Maybe they couldn't monetize it, maybe it was losing to a competitor with no idea on how to reverse the trend. Often you see things people think are worth billions. And when they try to capitalize on it, in the end it becomes less than worthless. Just look at how many startups Google bought just to kill the product shortly after, especially when it comes to social networking things. Maybe these managers took the right decision by saying "we are not good at that, we didn't find a way to sell it, let's kill it and invest our resources where we are good at instead of letting it become a burden". In the real world, you actually have to figure out the "???" before "profit".

by tinco 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ThePhysicist 6y ago

I think it's as you said, corporations didn't recognize the economic value of chat platforms back then. I think they were mostly focused on "Web 2.0" stuff so they probably tried putting all of their resources into that. You often see companies axe perfectly good business units just because they have a slightly lower margin or contribution to overall revenue, as they think putting the people from those units into the "cash cow" units will be better for the profit line (and it often is). We can see Google doing this over and over: They actually create a lot of nice products that could be profitable on their own, but since the main Google products are just making much more money per employee it still makes sense for them to axe the small "winning products" and have almost everyone work on the big winners.

a-dub 6y ago
I think AIM is a little different... It was born out of the original AOL dial-up walled garden service where they built a bridge to the Internet where people could download standalone clients and communicate with themselves and old school AOL subscribers. I don't know the internals, but I do know that much of the original AOL backend existed at least through the early 2000s which provided the instant messenger and authentication services [0]. It wouldn't surprise me if they were shutting down all of that infrastructure which I'm sure had a non-trivial cost to operate. I think the thing to keep in mind is that running centralized backend infrastructure (ie; store and forward, user state, directory) for an instant messaging service is not cheap and if the platform is open and allows for user supplied clients, there's almost zero direct monetization opportunity without stepping into unethical privacy breach territory. That means they're relegated to just pushing a brand, and it seems like a very expensive way to do that. Moreover, AOL transitioned in its later years into a digital journalism company, and as far as I know AOL itself as a consumer brand disappeared. [0] Worked on a whitebox set top box browser platform (ala Android) in the early 00s specifically with AOL as a client. Amusingly, the big feature they were trying to push was onscreen chatrooms for people who were watching the same thing live, which I guess if you think about it may have led to ways to monetize chat.
- icedchai 6y ago
  Too bad they didn't open source it. I'm sure most of the costs were in the employees required to operate and maintain the system. I am skeptical the infrastructure itself was that expensive, unless they were forced to keep it running on obsolete hardware. 90's tech is generally pretty light weight...
  - deaddodo 6y ago
    > unless they were forced to keep it running on obsolete hardware. If you read blog posts and the like from people involved in those projects (MSN Messenger and AIM/ICQ, specifically); the companies would take advantage of protocol updates or other scheduled downtime to failover to newer hardware. So I doubt they were ever stuck on any “obsolete hardware”.
    - a-dub 6y ago
      AOL launched around 1991 if I recall. I remember watching with great interest (I think I may have been in some kind of beta program) as it was obvious (at least to me at the time) that digital communications with a graphical UI was the future. (At the time in the US, there were a few commercial information services that were textual, General Electric Network Information Exchange and CompuServe were the big ones... followed by Prodigy which basically looked like teletext or a Bloomberg terminal for the home- it was clear that something better could be done, which ended up being AOL). The original AOL client shipped for DOS with Digital Research's GEM widget kit, it wouldn't surprise me if they used additional DR hardware and software on the backend (VAX anyone?). When I worked on the AOL project, I would see e-mails from AOL ops (from AOL screen names, no less!) about how they would take scary and unique sounding things like "access rotors" down, so I suspect that given how early the launch was, the backend was extremely bespoke simply because they were making things up as they went along in order to launch a new and unique thing. It wouldn't surprise me one bit to learn that it ran on VAX, HP3000, AS/400 or perhaps something even older and larger. You didn't hear about horizontal scaling nearly as much back then, most scaling consisted of "buy a bigger computer."
josephg 6y ago
> We can see Google doing this over and over: They actually create a lot of nice products that could be profitable on their own, but since the main Google products are just making much more money per employee it still makes sense for them to axe the small "winning products" and have almost everyone work on the big winners. Even 10 years ago they've been very explicit about this strategy internally. Management talks about it as "putting more wood behind fewer arrows". Its somewhat self reinforcing. I didn't try Google Inbox because I was sure it would be axed in a couple years anyway. (And I was right.) The more people make that same assumption, the fewer people try anything new from Google. And the worse any new products' metrics are - which in turn makes google axe more otherwise good products.
- george3d6 6y ago
  You may not be the target audience though, the target audience are probably people that aren't yet "bough into" the google ecosystem. So they are unaware of this axing policy. Anyone logging into chromium, using gmail and google calendar and an android device is already "theirs". What they want is to increase the share of people that are in the MS ecosystem (and presumably also OSX ecosystem, but that's mostly a status signaling thing, so the strategy there is probably different).
  - addicted 6y ago
    You will be surprised how many people are indeed aware of Google’s axing policy, if not even consciously. The reality is that so many of them have been burnt by Google. Picasa was an extremely popular photo management platform used by many. Google Play Music was extremely popular. Google Plus was not exactly popular but touched nearly every Google user, was highly promoted, and then disappeared. And then you come to the massive list of chat and calling apps that Google has arbitrarily spun up, promoted, and then killed. But even if we go with the idea that regular people are unaware of Google’s tendency, even subconsciously, there’s also the fact that the way most products become popular is through a smaller subset of influencers. And tech influencers, almost necessarily, are almost certainly aware of googles tendencies.
soneca 6y ago
I see Google also axing small winners in order to have people working on big bets. Undermining and then axing Orkut and then trying to create Google+ never made sense to me. A lot of non-brazilians non-indians (that didn’t use or even knew Orkut) defended the decision at the time, but I think history showed it was a bad bet.
- tinco 6y ago
  For sure, I think directors simply didn't understand how online communities worked. Facebook must have been the first company to fully realise this, buying both Instagram and WhatsApp but not attempting to internalize their communities under the Facebook brand. It would've been pure capital destruction if they had done that. I'm pretty sure they're going to have to write off the whatsapp investment. At least Instagram has a viable standalone business model. They'll lose the Whatsapp userbase at the drop of a hat, and it's already hard to monetize to begin with.
  - selestify 6y ago
    As someone who doesn't understand either, how do online communities work?
    - loopz 6y ago
      You build something addictive and "social". Now how you sell user data is the Billion dollar question.
- ridaj 6y ago
  I wouldn't romanticize Orkut. It wasn't that great and I think Facebook would've steamrolled it all the same, much as it did numerous other regional social networks around the world.
  - soneca 6y ago
    I think the causality is that it was not great because Google did not care about improving it. So it got stuck in time and then Facebook kept improving. Even a strategy of copying Facebook’s innovations (like FB does in Instagram and WhatsApp) would an improvement. Of course we will never know, but I think that betting on Orkut would have a better chance of facing Facebook than starting from scratch with Google+

agumonkey 6y ago

Another point of surprise is that these things grew somehow organically. Nobody went onto AIM or MSN because it's gonna revolutionize anything, it was just a simple need, simple programs.. no biggie. They're gone and now it's replaced by things that try to be grandiose and keep changing every year (or die ala Google) because the big new model is not right and they have a new big idea to chase.

xwolfi 6y ago
Well there is a big innovation in the business model, something MS missed, that the internet could be cheap on good phones and that chat apps could replace expensive SMSes. In fact, in France where SMS were free very early,whatsapp failed to pierce for much longer than elsewhere to a point the EU blamed our telecom companies from blocking innovation by being too cheap. MSN was a stupid senseless loss for a long while nonetheless, even in France, as Facebook took time to regrow the networks already made via MSN.
- unethical_ban 6y ago
  >the EU blamed our telecom companies from blocking innovation by being too cheap. A source would be nice, but I completely believe it - and it's infuriating. "The government is so effective, capitalists have nothing to improve in order to line their pockets!" It's what the GOP wants to do to municipal broadband service in the US.

forgotmypw17 6y ago

Generally speaking, they were shut down because they were designed in a way that they were centrally controlled by one entity which had the ability to shut them down, just like that.

dmingod666 6y ago
Discord, google chat, WhatsApp slack, Telegram, MsTeams, almost all commonly used chat clients are centrally managed..
- olivierestsage 6y ago
  Yes, and they work fine for now, but their long-term viability is far from guaranteed for this reason.
  - dmingod666 6y ago
    On a lighter note, "In the long term, we are all dead"
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

meerita 6y ago

Truth is, there were chances to renew, rebuild, ressurrect old messaging ecosystems, like ICQ but they sucked so bad it's really hard to take chance.

adrianN 6y ago
It was a golden age of instant messaging. You could talk to anybody on any network because multiprotocol clients just worked. I basically gave up on instant messaging because every company now digs deeper and deeper moats around their network.

Jenk 6y ago

They failed to monetise them. Most chat clients were placing ads to try and generate revenue but I doubt they ever made money from it. From what I remember of the blogs at the time, such as Martin Fowler's stuff on Yahoo! Messenger, the infrastructure was far from cheap, and the protocols were really insecure, too. I think Facebook was hoovering up a shitton of the messenger traffic very quickly, too, and the traffic on AIM/MSN/etc was dominated by crappy bots sending phishing links. All in all it wasn't a happy place and I doubt many actually missed them. This is the first link I've personally seen about the nostalgia of IM anyway.

xenihn 6y ago
AIM was profitable until the day that it was shut down.
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  How?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Macha 6y ago
    A lot of ads and not very much ongoing development. I'm not sure "until the day it was shut down" is totally correct though. AOL were moving from their own data centers to AWS at that stage and AIM was one of the last apps left in, so I find it hard to believe that AIM would still have shown green near the end if the data center costs were spread across the services using them (we didn't have a chargeback model in those days). I think the decision (I worked at AOL at the time, but far from AIM) to shut it down came down to: 1. There was no dedicated dev team 2. Consequently the tech was old and not up to then modern security practices 3. Even aside from security, it used a lot of in-house tech that other more actively maintained products like mail had migrated from and newer products never used. 4. Lots of the software it used like OS versions were going EOL 5. It needed an AWS migration as the data center was shutting down. 6. It didn't fit with the strategic direction (which was to use revenue from legacy but shrinking businesses like dialup/search/mail to pivot to owned content as a USP/headline piece for the adtech business) So someone had to make a cost/benefit analysis of shutting it down versus investing enough to bring it up to speed and that's before you even consider the user facing improvements that would have been needed to reclaim market share from Facebook and Skype. Also number 1 for the user facing improvements would have been "less ads, less intrusive ads" which also would have hurt revenue.

culopatin 6y ago

I’m still pissed that MSN Messenger died but the hot garbage of Skype continued. I wish the pick for in org chat was MSN and not Skype. Back in 2004 we had chat history, now MS had to come up with the behemoth of Teams to provide that feature. All we needed was msn on Android and iPhone with cloud backup of chats, that’s if.

Nextgrid 6y ago
Don't worry, they ruined Skype too. It used to be great and the P2P nature of it meant that file transfer speed, call quality & reliability was down to your network connection, something that you can control and fix should it be bad. The clients also used to be beautiful, both on Windows and Mac. They replaced both with an Electron abomination.
- causality0 6y ago
  Don't forget that if you accidentally merged your Microsoft account with your old Skype account you could lose all the contacts. I lost several gaming buddies that way when I didn't have alternate contact info.
brmgb 6y ago
Lync was MSN and was fairly popular and Skype for business was an evolution of the Lync client not the Skype client. So Microsoft did actually pick MSN. They just kept the stronger brand. Also it always had chat history. Teams is a different beast and a natural evolution. It's mostly centered around meetings and group chat which makes sense because that's what pro users actually want.
- mjcl 6y ago
  Skype for Business / Lync was originally called Office Communicator and has always used SIP for client/server communications.

everdrive 6y ago

If AOL or MSN had figured out how to monetize these platforms, they would have ruined them anyhow. They would have been lost in a different way.

Macha 6y ago
At least here the move to MSN to Facebook was largely driven by the move to monetise it more. More ads, more features which existed to give them places to show ads (I seem to remember it opening a today screen with news feeds at one point, think they did a twitter style thing with status updates too? Or was that imo?). The pull factor was everyone was on Facebook but the monetisation changes were a big push factor too

mrfusion 6y ago

What’s the story behind that? You’re right, that’s astounding.

brmgb 6y ago

> It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were worth billions. > It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management textbooks, but who knows. It's not short sightedness. It was perfectly reasonnable to close these plateforms (in so much as they were closed - Microsoft folded MSN into the Lync and Skype brands and rather successfully sold it to pro users). They were never going to make money with them as they were. You are just missing that modern instant messassing plateforms have little in common with AIM and MSN. If you look at what is valuable today, you have on one side WeChat and Whatsapp who took over the mobile space and are extremely valuable in emerging countries where text messaging became the main point of entry for conducting business and mobile payments. On the other side, you have Slack which use is centered around chat rooms and collaboration rather than direct messaging and whose popularity grew mainly on the shifting habits of a generation used to communicate via text, habits taken on smartphones. Then again, Microsoft was quick to reuse the infrastructure they already had to launch Teams which is very successful. So, unless you could foresee the emergence of a mobile first world, it completely made sense to pivot these services towards paying customers.

grumple 6y ago
It would not have been very difficult to pivot AIM into making money. First you add social media style profiles, then ads, then integrations, then feeds... none of this would have relied on mobile. Facebook didn't rely on mobile for many years after formation - the iPhone came out a couple of years after facebook did, and it took a few more years before smartphones saturated the market. Of course, it's easy to say this today having seen the result. But aol in particular was familiar with ad-driven business; they should have had the appropriate resources to anticipate the potential of their businesses.
- cmonagle 6y ago
  It's worth noting that AIM did make several attempts to integrate social media features, admittedly a bit late (the same year Facebook launched Chat). https://mashable.com/2008/05/19/aim-bebo-integration/ https://mashable.com/2008/05/19/aim-bebo-integration/

Spooky23 6y ago

Agreed. AOL in particular pioneered stuff like E2E encryption, etc. imo, the early 2000s platforms like AIM, Yahoo, MSN were the pinnacle of the technology, and successors are all worse in material ways. Today, iMessage is probably the best single messaging platform, which is pitiful because it has key design and UX flaws. I think in the case of AIM, it existed by virtue of and thrived under corporate neglect. The others withered as the complimentary services withered (Yahoo) or the corporate strategies shifted in inscrutable ways (Microsoft, Google). It was a weird scenario where MS and Goog behaved similarly... Microsoft with their mysterious purchase and subsequent neglect of Skype and Google with their drunken monkey product management process.

easton 6y ago
What are your UX flaws with iMessage? The reason why I like it is because it’s got good UX (except when a message doesn’t send for no reason), but if there’s something I’m missing out on in other messenger apps...
- tantalor 6y ago
  As an Android user, the most obvious flaw of iMessage is incompatibility.
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
  I'd say not being able to message ~85% of smartphone users is a pretty big UX flaw.
  - ulfw 6y ago
    That's not bad UX. That's a product limitation (a conscious one I might say).
    - Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
      This 'product limitation' makes user experience worse. Actually, it makes it unusable for most users. Whether this limitation is intentional is irrelevant, the UX is still bad.

numair 6y ago

Imagine there was an AOL executive in charge of AIM, and that Mark Zuckerberg offered the guy hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Facebook stock to hobble efforts to keep the platform relevant. Sounds like a totally crazy conspiracy theory, right? After all, it would have been totally obviously suspicious if someone made hundreds of millions of dollars by simply jumping from one middle-management role to another, right?

mikeodds 6y ago
Are you referencing someone specific here?
polynomial 6y ago
Even if those rumors are true (and no one has ever seen fit to publish them, so there's that) it wasn't just a single executive that killed AIM, it was multiple points of failure, including keeping it ad-free, which meant it pretty much existed outside AOL's revenue ecosystem, out on its own. And when Appelman & team released their open source version, that was akin to declaring a mutiny at anti-OSS AOL. Products need internal champions, without which, it doesn't take a conspiracy to kill them, they will just atrophy on their own.
- jaywalk 6y ago
  It's obviously been a long time so my memory could be faulty, but I distinctly remember ads in AIM and installing cracked versions of the client that removed the ads.
  - Macha 6y ago
    Yeah, in the last few years there was a big permanent ad at the footer of the contact list, plenty of ads in the web client and I think at one point there were sidebar ads in chat (that last one could have been msn)
    - polynomial 6y ago

polynomial 6y ago

AIM shutdown on Dec 15, 2017. This doesn't seem all that short sighted to me. More like legally blind.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago

On the contrary, social media and messaging platforms live on trend popularity alone. Features or bulk accounts ever created are mostly meaningless. MySpace stopped mattering once everyone moved to Facebook. These aren't driven by technology, they're driven solely by popularity. Once people move on, you might as well shut it down.

after_care 6y ago
Microsoft rebranded MSN to Lync, Skype and finally to Teams. AIM could have rebranded with the right product team behind it.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  And lost users every time. Also, you've merged a lot of unrelated products. MSN was folded into Skype after they bought Skype, a separate company. Lync, a corporate offering with no commonality with MSN, got rebranded Skype for Business, despite no actual relation or compatibility with Skype. Teams has nothing in common with either of the previously described product lines, though Microsoft is going to sunset SfB and push everyone over to Teams, given the success of that product. Renaming Lync as Skype for Business is actually the only "rebrand" Microsoft did here, and it did nothing to actually increase adoption of that platform, considering Microsoft chose to dump it less than five years later.

u801e 6y ago

And these messaging platforms did not require an exorbitant amount of computing resources to run. They were responsive to keyboard input (no signficant lag), and, as I recall, allowed one to keep a local log of messages sent and received.

sombremesa 6y ago

Reminds me of the time I read about someone inheriting six figures worth of Apple shares from their grandparents (who had an excellent cost basis, of course) and immediately selling it all to 'diversify'. It's not always easy to understand the long term benefits of holding on to 'risky' positions, and conventional 'wisdom' often steers you away from it.

raldi 6y ago
Wouldn’t this be equivalent to someone who inherited six figures in cash and failed to immediately use all of it to purchase Apple shares?
- tinco 6y ago
  This is the opposite, the big companies closed their messaging platforms because they wanted to shed low performing departments and consolidate, instead of maintaining them and keep attempting to make them florish which would be a form of diversification.
  - raldi 6y ago
    Right. And the analogy also fails because buying Apple shares is as easy as selling them; what makes the destruction of all the original IM platforms so dumb is that it's a one-way move. Once you shut one down, there's no Ctrl-Z.
roland35 6y ago
I think that was the correct call - hindsight is always easier to identify great stocks! In 2010, before I believed in index funds, I had an extra $1k and I was debating to put it in AAPL or this new thing I heard of called bitcoin. I ended up buying apple, and sold it after it doubled thinking I did great... Certainly not a bad outcome but it just goes to show how hard it is to predict anything.

sandworm101 6y ago

>> People miss AIM I miss how anyone with a packet sniffer could pull entire AIM messages out of the air. Just filter by port number and you could read them like a live chat window. I demonstrated this to a class while at law school. Scared the heck out of everyone who had been using it to pass answers to people when they were called on. (Failure to give a reasonable answer would impact your grade very quickly.)

loopz 6y ago

I think the true answer is pretty cut & dry: They didn't sell your data to everyone.

GuB-42 6y ago

Maybe they couldn't monetize it, maybe it was losing to a competitor with no idea on how to reverse the trend. Often you see things people think are worth billions. And when they try to capitalize on it, in the end it becomes less than worthless. Just look at how many startups Google bought just to kill the product shortly after, especially when it comes to social networking things. Maybe these managers took the right decision by saying "we are not good at that, we didn't find a way to sell it, let's kill it and invest our resources where we are good at instead of letting it become a burden". In the real world, you actually have to figure out the "???" before "profit".