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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 t

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+

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+