3 ms·

> 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

by 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/
  - thesuitonym 6y ago
    I believe AIM tried this more than once, and every time it was laughed out of the room. Nobody wanted it.
- brmgb 6y ago
  Facebook didn't have chat functionnalities until four years after it's started. AOL might have been able to enter the social network market at the time but the link with instant messaging was far from obvious then.
  - Izkata 6y ago
    Facebook chat seems to have been created in 2008, but I'm pretty sure AIM had chatrooms when I was in highschool, which would put it at pre-2006. Not exactly the same thing, but the foundation was already there - AIM already had user-made profiles as well.
    - okprod 6y ago
      Yea I used AOL chatrooms and then AIM chatrooms in the late 1990's into the 2000's. I liked that AIM allowed you to connect with strangers who may have had similar interests but were outside your network (unlike Facebook). A few people I met on AOL/AIM have become good friends IRL, and my cousin and a couple others I know met their future spouses on AIM.
user3939382 6y ago
> You are just missing that modern instant messassing plateforms have little in common with AIM and MSN. I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. AIM could have created a great mobile app with new features a la whatsapp et al, a new OSCAR protocol that was backwards compatible, and had a huge base of mobile users. Hindsight is 20/20, but it sounds like you're saying that even with hindsight closing AIM was the right call.
- brmgb 6y ago
  > Hindsight is 20/20, but it sounds like you're saying that even with hindsight closing AIM was the right call. It was the right call. AIM was losing money with no obvious way to monetize it. AOL was not in the same position than Microsoft was. They had little experience selling to pro customers and they were bleeding users to Google Talk and Facebook Messenger at the time. Even knowing that the mobile market would explose in popularity, it is far from obvious that AIM would have even been positionned to benefit from it. Google Talk was really popular then and notoriously failed to convert that into a leading position in the mobile market.
  - bonaldi 6y ago
    AIM was one of the very first apps on the iOS store — right out the gate. They could have sold it for $0.99 and seen how that went — it went surprisingly well for WhatsApp, after all.
  - trhway 6y ago
    >they were bleeding users to Google Talk and Facebook Messenger at the time. it was basically explicit transfer of the core value - user graph - from AOL to FB which probably doubled or tripled the FB graph at the time. The "small deal" and the modest "linked" below are kind of euphemisms describing the full buddies list import and thus sucking AIM dry if i remember correctly: https://marker.medium.com/the-untold-history-of-facebooks-most-controversial-growth-tool-2ea3bfeaaa66 https://marker.medium.com/the-untold-history-of-facebooks-mo... "During his time there, AOL wound up doing a small deal with Facebook that linked AOL Instant Messenger to Facebook’s website. But the biggest outcome of the deal was the connection Palihapitiya formed with Mark Zuckerberg." So the GP{3} saying "short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend" is very wrong. As you can see they played very long and successful game, just not the game you'd have expected them to play :)

by brmgb 6y ago

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/
- thesuitonym 6y ago
  I believe AIM tried this more than once, and every time it was laughed out of the room. Nobody wanted it.
brmgb 6y ago
Facebook didn't have chat functionnalities until four years after it's started. AOL might have been able to enter the social network market at the time but the link with instant messaging was far from obvious then.
- Izkata 6y ago
  Facebook chat seems to have been created in 2008, but I'm pretty sure AIM had chatrooms when I was in highschool, which would put it at pre-2006. Not exactly the same thing, but the foundation was already there - AIM already had user-made profiles as well.
  - okprod 6y ago
    Yea I used AOL chatrooms and then AIM chatrooms in the late 1990's into the 2000's. I liked that AIM allowed you to connect with strangers who may have had similar interests but were outside your network (unlike Facebook). A few people I met on AOL/AIM have become good friends IRL, and my cousin and a couple others I know met their future spouses on AIM.

user3939382 6y ago

> You are just missing that modern instant messassing plateforms have little in common with AIM and MSN. I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. AIM could have created a great mobile app with new features a la whatsapp et al, a new OSCAR protocol that was backwards compatible, and had a huge base of mobile users. Hindsight is 20/20, but it sounds like you're saying that even with hindsight closing AIM was the right call.

brmgb 6y ago
> Hindsight is 20/20, but it sounds like you're saying that even with hindsight closing AIM was the right call. It was the right call. AIM was losing money with no obvious way to monetize it. AOL was not in the same position than Microsoft was. They had little experience selling to pro customers and they were bleeding users to Google Talk and Facebook Messenger at the time. Even knowing that the mobile market would explose in popularity, it is far from obvious that AIM would have even been positionned to benefit from it. Google Talk was really popular then and notoriously failed to convert that into a leading position in the mobile market.
- bonaldi 6y ago
  AIM was one of the very first apps on the iOS store — right out the gate. They could have sold it for $0.99 and seen how that went — it went surprisingly well for WhatsApp, after all.
- trhway 6y ago
  >they were bleeding users to Google Talk and Facebook Messenger at the time. it was basically explicit transfer of the core value - user graph - from AOL to FB which probably doubled or tripled the FB graph at the time. The "small deal" and the modest "linked" below are kind of euphemisms describing the full buddies list import and thus sucking AIM dry if i remember correctly: https://marker.medium.com/the-untold-history-of-facebooks-most-controversial-growth-tool-2ea3bfeaaa66 https://marker.medium.com/the-untold-history-of-facebooks-mo... "During his time there, AOL wound up doing a small deal with Facebook that linked AOL Instant Messenger to Facebook’s website. But the biggest outcome of the deal was the connection Palihapitiya formed with Mark Zuckerberg." So the GP{3} saying "short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend" is very wrong. As you can see they played very long and successful game, just not the game you'd have expected them to play :)