9 ms·

All Google had to do was to keep improving on their original messaging software, Google Talk. Similarly, Microsoft would likely be a dominant player in the cha

All Google had to do was to keep improving on their original messaging software, Google Talk. Similarly, Microsoft would likely be a dominant player in the chat space today if they hadn't rebranded and renamed MSN Messenger several times and then abandoned it altogether. MSN Messenger was frickin awesome. You could draw pictures into the chat window. You could play a game of checkers while you chatted. It had a thriving ecosystem of apps and plugins. Everyone I knew used MSN Messenger... and then one day, Microsoft just said screw it, everyone can move to slow and clunky Skype... and that was the end of it. Hell, ICQ might still be around if AOL had put more development resources into it. The chat space is so bloody fragmented now, but it has nothing to do with Apple. Any one of the above mentioned companies could be killing it in this space if they hadn't pissed away what they had.

icedchai 5y ago
Even AOL Instant Messenger was awesome! I used it for almost 20 years. AOL could've turned it into Slack back in the 2000's. I used to work for startups that used private AIM chat rooms for ops issues, deployments, etc.
- pram 5y ago
  I miss it, used it since middle school. My wife and I used AIM until it shut down as our primary means of messaging even. RIP sweet prince.
chrisjc 5y ago
I guess you might be able to say that ICQ is still around? And one of the largest messaging platforms around, if not the largest? Of course I'm talking about the QQ variant, which is probably so far from the original ICQ that I have no leg to stand on making the above claim. Still, a very interesting story to follow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent_QQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent_QQ Acquired did a fantastic episode on Tencent (owner of QQ/WeChat) https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/season-3-episode-10-tencent https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/season-3-episode-10-tencent
- akoster 5y ago
  And another far-from-original variant is still kicking, aptly named ‘ICQ’ [1]. AOL sold off its ICQ assets to Digital Sky Technologies (now Mail.ru) group [2] which continues to develop and invest in it to this day. From what I understand, like LiveJournal (acquired similarly by a Russian company Rambler [3], ICQ continues to have a sizable user base in Eastern Europe from what I gather. [1] https://icq.com https://icq.com [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICQ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveJournal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveJournal
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    It's a generic problem that there is something like AOL, ICQ, Paltalk, Skype, etc. that is pretty good. The company behind it lets it rot, and then there is WebEx or Facebook Messenger or Slack or Discord or Zoom which is good for a while but it will rot too... Firms that make messaging products say they need to control the system for quality, innovation, spam control, etc. Yet, nobody questions that a Verizon customer can call a T-Mobile customer and vice versa. If all chat clients interoperated than there would be real competition to create the best client. As it is we have the pernicious pseudo-competition of two-sided markets where you install client X not because you want it or because it is good but because the person you want to talk to insists you install client X. If the European Union wanted to make the internet better they should mandate that chat clients be interoperable the same way that telephone services are interoperable.
    - jerf 5y ago
      The conclusion I come to is that it is unsustainable to offer IM for free. Perhaps some of the things like Slack that make money at the enterprise level can afford to keep free around and working well enough to function for longer. One of the subtle problems with offering a traditional IM service is that there are some scaling aspects that are super-linear with the number of users. For instance, as the average number of users on your subscription list increases, more of them have status changes per unit time, and each of those status changes must also go out to more users on average. The scaling issues aren't necessarily a full O(n^2) but they're often larger than simply O(n log n). Even after a many-times-over drop in the price of computing power it's still pretty expensive to offer something like that for free. If you look around, you can see how current solutions often work around that. For instance, Slack shards everyone simply by the nature of how it works, there isn't just a "Slack handle" that anyone can ping me at. We're not all in one big namespace. There's many fewer status updates it does, too, it's a lot more selective about what statuses you get. Another solution is Matrix; with how cheap computing power is, if a few hundred people bring their own to the party it's no big deal anymore to run a server like that, and no one person necessarily has to bring the big bucks. But if one entity tried to run the whole network, they'd certainly notice the bill.
mrkramer 5y ago
It's funny how Google Talk and MSN were so much popular but weren't able to successfully transition to mobile and capture that market. WhatsApp is number one messaging app in the world right now and probably will stay for some time.
- ugjka 5y ago
  What I like about whatsapp is that they don't do any bullshit. Unlike Viber, when they tried to pivot into some sort of social network for celebs and what not.
  - financetechbro 5y ago
    WhatsApp is very much a social network
    - ugjka 5y ago
      Then SMS is too, right?
      - mrkramer 5y ago
        SMS is communication protocol; you can only send text messages or reply to text messages, nothing beyond that. No profiles, status updates, friends etc.
      - 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
        No. Hard to do group threads. Not encrypted end to end (but WhatsApp is owned by FB so moot point). Even iMessage seems very much like a 1-1 messaging system.
      - eitland 5y ago
        SMS cannot do group chats in any meaningful way. So no, at least SMS is not a social network. I don't like WhatsApp anymore but it was in its time my favourite social network. I had all my important groups there, used it exclusively to communicate with close friends and family. It was the place were most images were shared and discussions were held and so on.
reincarnate0x14 5y ago
It's been a persistent source of black comedy that basic messaging across almost every platform with even some encryption, mixed media, workable audio and some experimental video chat was like a solved problem in 2008 and seemed like it would be totally in the bag and then a complete dumpster fire again by about 2016. Even people like me that hated MS and AOL had chat clients that could communicate with their networks and Google Talk/Hangouts and MSN Messenger were both great for what they were. At the time I felt like we had lost something important by moving to "push" networks versus e-mail but I'd take those days now in a heartbeat. Maybe by 2030, something like Matrix will have us back to what XMPP was doing and I'll be able to send a message to someone's shitty Teams from whatever Google's fifth chat replacement is by then. It's even worse when I'm traveling in east Asia and there are like 5 different Korean and several Chinese chat networks in addition to WhatsApp trying to be the next LINE and becoming the one-stop access point for nearly everything. I'm honestly expecting to see a 7-11 integrated messaging network at some point.
- genewitch 5y ago
  For cross service integration I recommend mattermost, too. It has plugins and a simple enough API you can use anything with almost anything else, even if you don't want to use mattermost clients.
- mr_toad 5y ago
  For whatever reason enterprise was slow to adopt messaging. I think a lot of this floundering about by Microsoft was an attempt to get wide scale enterprise adoption of a messaging protocol, and make money off of it.
- jareklupinski 5y ago
  We need a new Pidgin https://www.pidgin.im/ https://www.pidgin.im/ :( There were a few brief wonderful years when I had AIM, FB Messenger, GChat, and a few lesser known protocols all in different tabs in the same window. It's not like they all needed different interfaces; same data, different wire-noise...
  - 5y ago
decafninja 5y ago
I believe it's fragmented by country too. Despite living in the US, I actually don't know what's dominant here...is it iMessage? WhatsApp? Korea is dominated by KakaoTalk. I believe Japan is Line. China I believe has their own walled garden app ecosystems (WeChat & co.?) Judging from what all my European friends use, WhatsApp dominates at least the UK and Western Europe?
- afkqs 5y ago
  Also Viber that used to be the main contender of WhatsApp in Western Europe up until a couple of years ago. I believe it's still beating WhatsApp on market share in a couple of markets like Israel iirc.
- doom2 5y ago
  China has WeChat and QQ (though WeChat is way more popular). Both are basically mini OSes at this point, with apps and other third party functionality able to be built on top of them. I'm not Chinese, but use both of these apps to stay in touch with Chinese friends and family.
- mikhmha 5y ago
  In the U.S and Canada the dominant chat app is facebook messenger. WhatsApp seems to dominate in Europe and South America.
  - decafninja 5y ago
    I’m surprised. The younger generations (including my own, and I’m closer to 40 than 20…) seem to have abandoned the main Facebook product en masse in favor of first Instagram and then others. Are people still using FB Messenger stand-alone even if not using Facebook itself?
    - laurentlbm 5y ago
      I still use FB Messenger to keep in contact with a group of friends. I would love to use something else, but we were never able to agree on another platform to switch too... I barely use Facebook, don't have the app installed, and would probably stop using it completely if that group chat moved elsewhere. I have FB Messenger, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and Discord on my phone...
Narretz 5y ago
And now it seem Microsoft is pushing Teams instead of Skype. There are even two different Teams Apps in Windows 11, one for personal use, one for work.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- iam-TJ 5y ago
  That sounds like how there were two versions of MSN Messenger/Windows Messenger/Windows Live - one for 'personal' and the other for 'enterprise'. Cannot quite recall the exact differentiation now but I do recall many folks having problems with log-in credentials for one not working with the other about 20 years ago! Same happened with Skype after it was bought by Microsoft, and I seem to recall this is relatively recent. There were (are?) two Skype clients - one for 'personal' (the original Skype) and another for 'enterprise' (rebranded Windows Live for Enterprise possibly?) and not compatible. Again, I recall trying to help confused Windows users figure out why the (incorrect) client wouldn't log-in with certain credentials.
  - caf 5y ago
    Not a messenger, obviously, but they've done the same thing with OneDrive as well. This seems to be some kind of in-house Microsoft antipattern.
    - tatersolid 5y ago
      Not an anti-pattern. Keeping work and personal stuff intentionally separate is a good thing.
- Melatonic 5y ago
  Thats because there were also two different Skypes - Skype for Business (which was Lync) and Skype. Two totally different platforms with different code. God knows why they named them the same. Teams is supposed to completely replace Skype for Business
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> Hell, ICQ might still be around if AOL had put more development resources into it. What are you saying? ICQ is still around.
- grandpoobah 5y ago
  I don't know anyone who uses it anymore, do you? :D
pornel 5y ago
Skype before Microsoft was great. It was simple and reliable. Microsoft just kept making it slower, buggier, easier to eavesdrop on, and kept "refreshing" the UI over and over again until it became unbearable.
maeil 5y ago
Buying Skype for billions and then killing MSN to force people on to it is easily the worst decision I can think of by consumer-oriented big tech company after 2005. If anyone involved in the decision still works at Microsoft they're doing something wrong. People make mistakes but this was one that has ended up costing tens of billions in value (possibly 100+) and that even a child could've told you was an awful idea - I was pretty young and I sure could've! Maybe the failure to make Windows phones big is a bigger failure but that's more of a failure to produce a good product than one decision. You could name Yahoo "not buying" Facebook/Google but deciding not to do something is more understandable than throwing away a golden egg.
- ulfw 5y ago
  The same company buying Nokia (world's largest mobile phone company for years) only to let it rot completely wasn't much better.

icedchai 5y ago

Even AOL Instant Messenger was awesome! I used it for almost 20 years. AOL could've turned it into Slack back in the 2000's. I used to work for startups that used private AIM chat rooms for ops issues, deployments, etc.

pram 5y ago
I miss it, used it since middle school. My wife and I used AIM until it shut down as our primary means of messaging even. RIP sweet prince.

chrisjc 5y ago

I guess you might be able to say that ICQ is still around? And one of the largest messaging platforms around, if not the largest? Of course I'm talking about the QQ variant, which is probably so far from the original ICQ that I have no leg to stand on making the above claim. Still, a very interesting story to follow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent_QQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent_QQ Acquired did a fantastic episode on Tencent (owner of QQ/WeChat) https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/season-3-episode-10-tencent https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/season-3-episode-10-tencent

akoster 5y ago
And another far-from-original variant is still kicking, aptly named ‘ICQ’ [1]. AOL sold off its ICQ assets to Digital Sky Technologies (now Mail.ru) group [2] which continues to develop and invest in it to this day. From what I understand, like LiveJournal (acquired similarly by a Russian company Rambler [3], ICQ continues to have a sizable user base in Eastern Europe from what I gather. [1] https://icq.com https://icq.com [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICQ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveJournal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveJournal
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  It's a generic problem that there is something like AOL, ICQ, Paltalk, Skype, etc. that is pretty good. The company behind it lets it rot, and then there is WebEx or Facebook Messenger or Slack or Discord or Zoom which is good for a while but it will rot too... Firms that make messaging products say they need to control the system for quality, innovation, spam control, etc. Yet, nobody questions that a Verizon customer can call a T-Mobile customer and vice versa. If all chat clients interoperated than there would be real competition to create the best client. As it is we have the pernicious pseudo-competition of two-sided markets where you install client X not because you want it or because it is good but because the person you want to talk to insists you install client X. If the European Union wanted to make the internet better they should mandate that chat clients be interoperable the same way that telephone services are interoperable.
  - jerf 5y ago
    The conclusion I come to is that it is unsustainable to offer IM for free. Perhaps some of the things like Slack that make money at the enterprise level can afford to keep free around and working well enough to function for longer. One of the subtle problems with offering a traditional IM service is that there are some scaling aspects that are super-linear with the number of users. For instance, as the average number of users on your subscription list increases, more of them have status changes per unit time, and each of those status changes must also go out to more users on average. The scaling issues aren't necessarily a full O(n^2) but they're often larger than simply O(n log n). Even after a many-times-over drop in the price of computing power it's still pretty expensive to offer something like that for free. If you look around, you can see how current solutions often work around that. For instance, Slack shards everyone simply by the nature of how it works, there isn't just a "Slack handle" that anyone can ping me at. We're not all in one big namespace. There's many fewer status updates it does, too, it's a lot more selective about what statuses you get. Another solution is Matrix; with how cheap computing power is, if a few hundred people bring their own to the party it's no big deal anymore to run a server like that, and no one person necessarily has to bring the big bucks. But if one entity tried to run the whole network, they'd certainly notice the bill.

mrkramer 5y ago

It's funny how Google Talk and MSN were so much popular but weren't able to successfully transition to mobile and capture that market. WhatsApp is number one messaging app in the world right now and probably will stay for some time.

ugjka 5y ago
What I like about whatsapp is that they don't do any bullshit. Unlike Viber, when they tried to pivot into some sort of social network for celebs and what not.
- financetechbro 5y ago
  WhatsApp is very much a social network
  - ugjka 5y ago
    Then SMS is too, right?
    - mrkramer 5y ago
      SMS is communication protocol; you can only send text messages or reply to text messages, nothing beyond that. No profiles, status updates, friends etc.
    - 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
      No. Hard to do group threads. Not encrypted end to end (but WhatsApp is owned by FB so moot point). Even iMessage seems very much like a 1-1 messaging system.
    - eitland 5y ago
      SMS cannot do group chats in any meaningful way. So no, at least SMS is not a social network. I don't like WhatsApp anymore but it was in its time my favourite social network. I had all my important groups there, used it exclusively to communicate with close friends and family. It was the place were most images were shared and discussions were held and so on.

reincarnate0x14 5y ago

It's been a persistent source of black comedy that basic messaging across almost every platform with even some encryption, mixed media, workable audio and some experimental video chat was like a solved problem in 2008 and seemed like it would be totally in the bag and then a complete dumpster fire again by about 2016. Even people like me that hated MS and AOL had chat clients that could communicate with their networks and Google Talk/Hangouts and MSN Messenger were both great for what they were. At the time I felt like we had lost something important by moving to "push" networks versus e-mail but I'd take those days now in a heartbeat. Maybe by 2030, something like Matrix will have us back to what XMPP was doing and I'll be able to send a message to someone's shitty Teams from whatever Google's fifth chat replacement is by then. It's even worse when I'm traveling in east Asia and there are like 5 different Korean and several Chinese chat networks in addition to WhatsApp trying to be the next LINE and becoming the one-stop access point for nearly everything. I'm honestly expecting to see a 7-11 integrated messaging network at some point.

genewitch 5y ago
For cross service integration I recommend mattermost, too. It has plugins and a simple enough API you can use anything with almost anything else, even if you don't want to use mattermost clients.
mr_toad 5y ago
For whatever reason enterprise was slow to adopt messaging. I think a lot of this floundering about by Microsoft was an attempt to get wide scale enterprise adoption of a messaging protocol, and make money off of it.
jareklupinski 5y ago
We need a new Pidgin https://www.pidgin.im/ https://www.pidgin.im/ :( There were a few brief wonderful years when I had AIM, FB Messenger, GChat, and a few lesser known protocols all in different tabs in the same window. It's not like they all needed different interfaces; same data, different wire-noise...
- 5y ago

decafninja 5y ago

I believe it's fragmented by country too. Despite living in the US, I actually don't know what's dominant here...is it iMessage? WhatsApp? Korea is dominated by KakaoTalk. I believe Japan is Line. China I believe has their own walled garden app ecosystems (WeChat & co.?) Judging from what all my European friends use, WhatsApp dominates at least the UK and Western Europe?

afkqs 5y ago
Also Viber that used to be the main contender of WhatsApp in Western Europe up until a couple of years ago. I believe it's still beating WhatsApp on market share in a couple of markets like Israel iirc.
doom2 5y ago
China has WeChat and QQ (though WeChat is way more popular). Both are basically mini OSes at this point, with apps and other third party functionality able to be built on top of them. I'm not Chinese, but use both of these apps to stay in touch with Chinese friends and family.
mikhmha 5y ago
In the U.S and Canada the dominant chat app is facebook messenger. WhatsApp seems to dominate in Europe and South America.
- decafninja 5y ago
  I’m surprised. The younger generations (including my own, and I’m closer to 40 than 20…) seem to have abandoned the main Facebook product en masse in favor of first Instagram and then others. Are people still using FB Messenger stand-alone even if not using Facebook itself?
  - laurentlbm 5y ago
    I still use FB Messenger to keep in contact with a group of friends. I would love to use something else, but we were never able to agree on another platform to switch too... I barely use Facebook, don't have the app installed, and would probably stop using it completely if that group chat moved elsewhere. I have FB Messenger, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and Discord on my phone...

Narretz 5y ago

And now it seem Microsoft is pushing Teams instead of Skype. There are even two different Teams Apps in Windows 11, one for personal use, one for work.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
iam-TJ 5y ago
That sounds like how there were two versions of MSN Messenger/Windows Messenger/Windows Live - one for 'personal' and the other for 'enterprise'. Cannot quite recall the exact differentiation now but I do recall many folks having problems with log-in credentials for one not working with the other about 20 years ago! Same happened with Skype after it was bought by Microsoft, and I seem to recall this is relatively recent. There were (are?) two Skype clients - one for 'personal' (the original Skype) and another for 'enterprise' (rebranded Windows Live for Enterprise possibly?) and not compatible. Again, I recall trying to help confused Windows users figure out why the (incorrect) client wouldn't log-in with certain credentials.
- caf 5y ago
  Not a messenger, obviously, but they've done the same thing with OneDrive as well. This seems to be some kind of in-house Microsoft antipattern.
  - tatersolid 5y ago
    Not an anti-pattern. Keeping work and personal stuff intentionally separate is a good thing.
Melatonic 5y ago
Thats because there were also two different Skypes - Skype for Business (which was Lync) and Skype. Two totally different platforms with different code. God knows why they named them the same. Teams is supposed to completely replace Skype for Business

thaumasiotes 5y ago

> Hell, ICQ might still be around if AOL had put more development resources into it. What are you saying? ICQ is still around.

grandpoobah 5y ago
I don't know anyone who uses it anymore, do you? :D

pornel 5y ago

Skype before Microsoft was great. It was simple and reliable. Microsoft just kept making it slower, buggier, easier to eavesdrop on, and kept "refreshing" the UI over and over again until it became unbearable.

maeil 5y ago

Buying Skype for billions and then killing MSN to force people on to it is easily the worst decision I can think of by consumer-oriented big tech company after 2005. If anyone involved in the decision still works at Microsoft they're doing something wrong. People make mistakes but this was one that has ended up costing tens of billions in value (possibly 100+) and that even a child could've told you was an awful idea - I was pretty young and I sure could've! Maybe the failure to make Windows phones big is a bigger failure but that's more of a failure to produce a good product than one decision. You could name Yahoo "not buying" Facebook/Google but deciding not to do something is more understandable than throwing away a golden egg.

ulfw 5y ago
The same company buying Nokia (world's largest mobile phone company for years) only to let it rot completely wasn't much better.