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Long ago Microsoft had MSN Messenger, which was one of the leading messaging apps. It worked well, and many 'normal' users were using it. Then Microsoft dissolv

Long ago Microsoft had MSN Messenger, which was one of the leading messaging apps. It worked well, and many 'normal' users were using it. Then Microsoft dissolved the team behind it and screwed up the product so bad with bloatware and ads that everyone moved to WhatsApp (except in the US where people went back to texting). Then Microsoft came out with Communicator, renamed it to Lync, which was a corporate messenger/meeting software. It used its own server, that could federate outside. It worked very well. They added LiveMeeting as a separate app for meetings, built on the same protocols. Our company used it with the "roundtable" camera from 2008, and it all worked amazingly well. We had meetings with people joining in from home and other offices over the internet using inexpensive webcams, 15 years ago. Then they bought Skype and it went downhill from there. I don't know what happened, but they took a lot of time integrating technologies from Skype (peer-to-peer) with their own tech (which was more telecom/server based) and tried competing with ever-changing perceived competitors by copying parts of their features and UI, without ever making any feature really good. They integrated everything into a single program, Skype for Business, now renamed Teams, and made it bloated and obnoxious. Just try to get it to not start at login... It's like MSN all over again. I think the Communicator/LiveMeeting software combo they had 15 years ago would still (conceptually) do pretty well as messenger/meeting software now, when modernized. It was much less intrusive and behaved like nice software that you actually wanted to use.

twobitshifter 4y ago
I started a new job and decided to go all in on using o365, including keeping notes in onenote. They’re launching a new version next month and I’m hoping that things go in the right direction and they keep the features i’ve just started to use.
- vadym909 4y ago
  The innocence is so cute in this one
- dismalpedigree 4y ago
  I wish you well, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
- 314 4y ago
  Sweet summer child
- marvinvz 4y ago
  I signed into o365 a few days ago and it recommended a random excel file of a completely unrelated department to me. Not sure why an office application needs to "recommend" files.
  - Mindwipe 4y ago
    Indeed. The Sharepoint app for iOS is particularly fun for this. I have gone to the trouble of installing a Sharepoint application. The idea that people are doing this who do not want a directory tree as 99.99999% of what they do is insane.
peteradio 4y ago
> Just try to get it to not start at login... God, why do PMs push this crap. Like users are picking their communication software of the day based on what pops up into their face.
- bluGill 4y ago
  Communication software needs to run in case someone wants to contact you. It should start in the background though.
  - jknoepfler 4y ago
    Communications software needs to run when and only when I want it to run. Who in the heck are you to tell me when to run an application on a device I own?
    - ryandrake 4y ago
      Thank you, we need more of this mentality. I am in charge of my computer, not some tech company product manager 1,000 miles away. If I don't command my computer to run a program, it should not run it. If I don't think some company's messenger application should run in the background on startup, it should not run in the background on startup.
    - Kostic 4y ago
      Do you also start/stop the modem on your phone whenever you need it? For the majority of people it makes sense to have a comms app always running as they come to expect that from the smartphones. Granted, there should be an easy way to configure this behavior for advanced users.
      - JohnFen 4y ago
        > Do you also start/stop the modem on your phone whenever you need it? Yes, I do (effectively). My phone spends a large percentage of the day in airplane mode.
      - 4y ago
philippejara 4y ago
It's kind of crazy to look back and see just how much worse we are today than some years ago with regards to this stuff. I remember an old social media named Orkut, had pretty much everything facebook had and more, also had a huge userbase in brazil and india(?) iirc, but just goot overtaken by facebook. Original skype would probably work better than zoom does today with a few tweaks(I assume, could be wrong there when it comes to joining calls without being "friends" and such). Never used communicator but I assume it would fill the role just as well by your description. Not even going to mention forums getting gutted and being replaced with discord servers that nobody uses voice(the reason i'd assume one would prefer to use a discord server). Cmmunities that didn't want to go for a forum had several "closed community" website creators(that I cannot for the life of me remember the names) and that all got replaced by subreddits... Quite sad to see the internet continuously being shrunk down to the lowest common denominator, some federated efforts like the fediverse make me quite hopeful, a shame most of them mimick twitter.
- mig39 4y ago
  Even crazier when you realize Orkut was owned by Google!
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    That was the problem. Orkut was successful, but that doesn't stop Google from shutting down services. Trusting a Google service to be around long-term is folly unless it's Maps or Gmail.
    - kareemsabri 4y ago
      I don't think Orkut was successful for Google, where success in measured in annual revenue in billions.
      - flakeoil 4y ago
        I guess that's what the parent comment meant. Google tries many new products (in-house developed or acquired). If it does not reach a user base of several 100 million users (or 10's of billions of revenue) after a few years then they will scrap it.
kbrannigan 4y ago
Those messenger programs were ahead of their time. Even today they feel modern. I still remember the jingle : " ta-dat-dat " with the screen shaking. The tube monitors with that square screens, that could heat a whole room.
- stevenhuang 4y ago
  Nudges IIRC they were called. I remember using cheat engine and sending infinite nudges to friends. Good times.
drewcoo 4y ago
Microsoft had several different non-interoperable message apps, including two named "Messenger." Those golden days didn't look so shiny when we were there. Luckily, there was Pidgin/Adium, so we could have one app to talk all the protocols.
- mBVth4DiupvBPY4 4y ago
  I'm not sure what you're referring to with two non-interoperable message apps named Messenger? There was MSN Messenger/.NET Messenger/Windows Messenger/Windows Live Messenger, but those were interoperable (they were the same thing, just updates). They also managed to wrangle compatibility with Yahoo Messenger (although by then no one I knew still used Yahoo), and apparently Facebook Messenger, and then did a crappy merger/migration to Skype. I'd go back to those days in a heartbeat, and I was there.
  - coredog64 4y ago
    NT had a built in messenger service that operated on named pipes. It was one of those services you disabled as soon as you could.
    - merb 4y ago
      net send *
    - pdntspa 4y ago
      I got into so much trouble as a kid for abusing that...
    - virgulino 4y ago
      To be fair, it was a local network toy, more akin to "talk" or "finger" in Unix.
- prpl 4y ago
  Trillian before that
barnabee 4y ago
They also bought (and ruined) MindAlign which had originally been developed and spun off from UBS investment bank and was light years ahead of its time. What they turned it into / replaced it with was such a depressing step backwards.
- pasc1878 4y ago
  Well that was just a nice GUI on top of IRC, and probably some work on the server.
- Jaruzel 4y ago
  Yup, MindAlign was born out of an internal product in UBS called 'Interchange'. Interchange was a java client, that fundamentally spoke standard IRC to IRC servers, but also used extra external databases to auto-connect users to channels and secure sensitive channels. The client also forced real names (via Active Directory), and was hardcoded to only connect to the UBS IRC servers. The IRC servers themselves were altered to only allow Interchange clients to connect[1] and to only allow approved bots in channels most of which did full chat logging for compliance purposes. Interchange was so slow it was nicknamed 'Interchug'. The IRC server network spanned the UBS WAN network globally, and all staff were encouraged to use it. For the era, no other large banking corporate had anything similar running (officially). Source: I worked in UBS IT during this period. --- [1] Although the more enterprising of us just HEX edited mIRC to report the Interchange client name.
  - pasc1878 4y ago
    I think Interchange was not originally Java but a NeXTStep application. I am also ex UBS. I don't remember it being slow though.= but then again I might not have used the Java version just NeXTStep and the mIRC hack.
    - Jaruzel 4y ago
      Did you and I ever cross paths ? Wondering now if I know you ;)
datavirtue 4y ago
An ancient version of Skype for Business is embedded into my old gaming rig. I have tried on several occasions over the years to nuke it but I could never be bothered to break out a debugger and a process analyzer to get to the root cause. It still opens on every restart. I don't even think Microsoft knows how to remove it.
- mildchalupa 4y ago
  Same
virgulino 4y ago
Not to forget that 26 years ago, starting in 1996, we had Microsoft NetMeeting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_NetMeeting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_NetMeeting A very good VOIP / videoconferencing / white-boarding / application sharing client present on almost all Windows computers, open standards interoperable, with an official ActiveX Control and public API. You could easily embed it into your HTML site (IE compatible only), or drag and drop it into your Visual Basic / Delphi / Microsoft Office script application and thus effortlessly embed and control the functionality into your own website/application. https://youtu.be/B8wH5pRcWts https://youtu.be/B8wH5pRcWts https://news.microsoft.com/1996/09/30/microsoft-ships-netmeeting-sdk-provides-standards-based-platform-for-developing-conferencing-solutions-for-the-internet/ https://news.microsoft.com/1996/09/30/microsoft-ships-netmee...
- stephenhuey 4y ago
  When I started enjoying a blazing fast connection at Rice University in 1998, I frequently enjoyed MS Netmeeting video calls with friends who were scattered across the country. Within a few years it was a distant memory, and it surprises me how it was well over a dozen years before reliably easy video calls became commonplace.
- asciimov 4y ago
  It's been a long time since I heard mention of NetMeeting. I remember using NetMeeting in late 97 or early 98 on a 33.6 kbps modem. One of the most memorable parts was the area were you could find other random people to chat with on audio. I had many enjoyable conversations with various people on there, something that I don't think would work well today with the increased number of horrible netizens.
  - verinus 4y ago
    I remember NetMeeting from around 2000 when we used it to at university to do shared desktop sessions for some team assignments... worked pretty well as far as I remember.
kevin_b_er 4y ago
"Skype for Business" was just a rebranded Lync. Consumer-land skype remained a different thing until Microsoft killed that for Teams. Skype for Business' exe was lync.exe right up until the end. "Teams" was a brand new thing and didn't use the Communicator/Lync/Skype for Business architecture.
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  >Skype for Business' exe was lync.exe right up until the end What do you mean "end"? We still use it!
  - nikau 4y ago
    I miss skype, only because there was a pidgin plugin that allowed you to use a nice lightweight and snappy client.
  - cube00 4y ago
    It's now end of life for Teams, there's no chance they'll rename the exe at this point. You'll be lucky to get anything except the most critical bugs fixed.
- weberer 4y ago
  Then why does it say "Skype is using the microphone" In the KDE taskbar when on a Teams call?
thekingofrome 4y ago
TIL people in the US use SMS
- JohnFen 4y ago
  SMS is universal and free in the US, and you don't have to juggle a bunch of different messaging services.
- shadowofneptune 4y ago
  Why don't people use it elsewhere? I know that WhatsApp is dominant, but why?
  - conradfr 4y ago
    A combination of less iPhone dominance, different data/sms rates and other factors.
  - ithinkso 4y ago
    Hard to say, they were all the rage and suddenly just kinda stopped being used (their only purpose now I believe is 2FA, and spam). One reason I can think of is chat history syncing between devices
  - Valakas_ 4y ago
    Let me turn that around to answer your question: Why isn't the technology behind SMS used for internet?
  - doix 4y ago
    It's really convenient for travel, you don't need to pay international rates for SMS, just connect to free wifi and you're golden. If/When you buy a local SIM card, people can still reach how they used too, they don't need to text a new number. When you change your number for some reason, you don't need to message everyone that you have a new number etc.
  - mr_mitm 4y ago
    Unlimited texting plans were rare in some parts of the world. If you need to pay 9 cents per text, WhatsApp is a godsend. I even had to pay for receiving texts or pay a premium on sending texts when being abroad (which happens much more often in Europe). My understanding is that during the same time period, unlimited texting in the USA was pretty much expected. Luckily, we now have free roaming in the EU, so we don't have to worry about extra charges when using the mobile internet, but I still have to be careful when visiting Switzerland (which, again, is just a 2h drive for me).
blendergeek 4y ago
You forgot that MS also bought GroupMe and it somehow still exists.
thejackgoode 4y ago
I don’t know which universe you live in, but things like Microsoft Communicator/Lync and “worked very well” do not belong to the same sentence in mine.
- tdeck 4y ago
  I too remember Lync being incredibly buggy. It's probably the least reliable chat software I've ever used.
mindracer 4y ago
I had to support live meeting in a 80k seat org at the time and it was an awful piece of software. Quite often it would fail to launch, the Outlook plugin would fail to load. You could spend hours playing with registry settings, app config trying to get the plug-in to launch. Live meeting was terrible and deserves to be fired into the sun.
phreack 4y ago
What's hilarious and sad is that MSN Messenger had a lot of features back in the early '00s that major players like WhatsApp and Telegram now only implement through gritted teeth, one every year if you're lucky. Things like custom emojis, audio messages, sending a drawing, avatars you could see, choosing your display name, exportable conversation history, you even had games! Nowadays people cheer for the bare minimum in UX that we already had 20 years ago. And that's ignoring that niche it filled where people were identified by emails, and the particular social rules of knowing that if you went online, it meant you wanted to spend a while talking to people and were available to do so. Discord is kind of similar in that last aspect, but it's enormously complex for the average user and intended for servers, not for 1 on 1 conversations with your contacts. I've always wanted to build a clone of Messenger just because of how much I miss it.
- djtango 4y ago
  Right but WhatsApp solved a very different problem in the beginning - how do I send a message to someone who isn't online right now (or has a flaky connection). THAT was what was needed for mobile devices. I remember trying to use MSN messenger when I was on WAP and it sucked. And then I remember Skype on iPhone sucked for messages too. SMS also wasn't great if you were remotely international and had friends and family not in the same country as you. It took two whole years for Skype to rearchitect away from peer to peer (understandably so). To this day, when you want guaranteed delivery, in order and without duplicates WhatsApp runs circles around its competitors. Compare that with Slack which both on desktop and mobile regularly has weird issues with successfully delivering a message. Ultimately avatars are nice to have and later on top of a reliable messaging service but otherwise I'd take boring old text over flaky rich messaging every day of the week.
  - hansel_der 4y ago
    > To this day, when you want guaranteed delivery, in order and without duplicates WhatsApp runs circles around its competitors. idk about slack et.al. but telegram does that with native clients for linux, android, ios and windows. even media-sync is pretty much flawless ime.
  - 4y ago
Galanwe 4y ago
> Then they bought Skype and it went downhill from there. I don't know what happened, but they took a lot of time integrating technologies from Skype (peer-to-peer) with their own tech (which was more telecom/server based) I was at Skype at the time, working on this very migration, so maybe I can shed some light on what happened. There were a number of failures (on Microsoft part mainly) that made the whole thing collapse: - The original Skype developers were used to program in C++ with on-premise Linux servers. When the migration plan came in, the tech stack switched to C# on Azure. Most developers were not really keen or experienced working with C# and Windows. Azure was very much beta at the time, I remember the philosophy was "eat your own dog food" which created an insane amount of frustration working with sub-par tooling, little to no documentation, plenty of bugs on Azure. There is also a mentality/philosophy shift of working with C#/Windows coming from C++/Linux which was not great for team morale. - Support for group chat was paramount, which meant there was a need of transition from peer to peer to client server. - The original Lync team was very much annoyed with the rebranding and migration plan and was not really keen on helping Skype developers. I remember us receiving a "dump" of the Lync VCS as tech reference, in the form of a big fat multi GB archive. There were tons of binaries, even videos in there... Lot of fun... - MS/Lync used a _huge_ amount of proprietary SIP extensions to have Lync work. - The migration to the cloud and client-server model was accompanied by a huge migration to a brand new microservices in C# project. It meant recoding everything in a new language, a new platform, a new protocol, dealing with hundreds of half baked microservices in a half baked cloud platform. It was slow, buggy, and an architect astronaut fest. - Overall 99% of the original Skype calling team resigned and joined Twilio. - Pretty much every manager from MS that I have seen at Skype stayed no more than a year then rotated to a new role, at one point we had 4 changes of management in 2 years. - Every single interaction with Microsoft management was surreal. Pardon my language, but they were not technical at all, unable to understand the most basic architecture proposals, bullshitting tech talk 9 words out of 10,and overall they were living in an other planet in terms of market share and branding. You could definitely tell that they were talking "product" and "objectives" for Skype, but never used it, understand it's competition, challenges, etc. Pure bozos. In the end I think Microsoft still extracted some value from Skype, mainly: - Skype had good PSTN contracts worth a lot of value. The matching engine to select the cheaper one dynamically had value too, and historical data. - The brand itself had value for customers.
forty 4y ago
It's funny, I have used Communicator/Lync and I remember everyone hated it, including the CEO which was a MS fan, which was the reason why we started using it in the first place. I remember it not being even able to sync presence status properly. We switched quickly to Hipchat, which was not great, but felt like an improvement at the time ^^
baby 4y ago
It's really crazy how everyone had MSN back when I was younger. It was great, it had webcam stuff, personalization of font size and colors and such, plenty of emoticons, and even GAMES! I can't believe they managed to kill this amazing product. I do feel like FB is being killed in the same way, as it was an amazing product for many years and has slowly become ads and unrelated content in a noisy newsfeed :( I really think FB should go back to its roots and simplify the interface and go back to the chronological timeline. I don't understand why product feel that they need to change to stay relevant. They should just launch other products instead of changing what works well.
- przemub 4y ago
  It's because it's not enough any more to have a company with a stable source of income; investors expect a stable increase of income.
KronisLV 4y ago
> Then they bought Skype and it went downhill from there. I still remember older versions of Skype, which felt usable and rock solid. I actually used some from I think http://www.oldversion.com/windows/skype/ http://www.oldversion.com/windows/skype/ back in the day for my personal stuff, because the reworked UI was just worse. But nowadays, I don't really care that much, whether I have to use Skype, Teams, Zoom, Slack, Discord, Jitsi, Mattermost, Rocket.Chat or something else - all of the communication tools out there feel viable, just none are excellent. That said, WhatsApp feels like it's an order of magnitude faster (on mobile) than Signal and Telegram somehow (privacy implications aside, it's still one of the more popular ways to chat with people in the EU), which I found interesting. Of course, it's generally for chatting, not necessarily team collaboration (where you'd want channels and workspaces). On the desktop, however, generally you're just dealing with packaged browser apps most of the time. I do feel like mentioning how nice having self-hostable non-cloud options is when you need them, be it Nextcloud Talk or the aforementioned Jitsi, Mattermost, Rocket.Chat or something else.
- vasvir 4y ago
  Matrix is a nice federated protocol and with its client element (formerly riot) https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/element https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/element both demonstrate some respect for user privacy boundaries. But since it is mostly a network effects game and the setup of keys may be somewhat of putting I am not very optimistic. Its' a shame though...
gertrunde 4y ago
Skype for Business (SfB) was not renamed Teams, the two products are completely unrelated, beyond Teams being a successor product to SfB. Although there was a little bit of integration between SfB and Skype, (and between SfB and Teams as well) - so could communicate from one to the other. Although Skype for Business Online was phased out in favour of Teams, the on-prem version still exists, probably for those customers that cannot/will not use Teams for regulatory/compliance reasons, and no end of life date has been announced for the on-prem version yet.
qsdf38100 4y ago
Text communcation with Lync was the same as MSN Messenger, super basic. No chat history, no channels. I wouldn't say it's any better than Teams.
wslh 4y ago
Don't forget the Microsoft acquisition of Groove Networks [1] which was a prescient, but failed, app in team collaboration with a P2P serverless approach. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groove_Networks?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groove_Networks?wprov=sfla1
Lutger 4y ago
Isn't teams just a reskinned SharePoint with messenging and conference capabilities added? Does it use tech from the Skype acquisition? I do remember everybody using Skype, it was so popular it created a verb of its own, we used to skype with each other. Microsoft paid what was an enormous amount for it back then, then basically let it rot. Really surprising.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > Microsoft paid what was an enormous amount for it back then, then basically let it rot. They didn't just let it rot. They actively ruined it.
- Jaruzel 4y ago
  Every "team" you make in Teams is a SharePoint site on the backend. Every "channel' under a "team" is a sub-folder on the SharePoint site. Each time you upload files to a "channel" via the "files" tab, it goes into the Documents area on that SharePoint site[1]. The exception for this, is private channels (the ones with little padlocks next to their names). These are created in their own isolated SharePoint site outside of the parent "teams" SharePoint site. It's done this way because the access security around teams/channels is the SharePoint security system. It's a totally nuts way to do it. Teams is basically built using existing MS technologies in the same way that incorrect LEGO bricks can be forced together if you try hard enough. I don't think MS have the ability to build an application from ground up anymore. --- [1] The one upside of this, is that if you only care about the files held in Teams, you can "Sync" the site to your PC, and it appears as a virtual folder in File Explorer.
classified 4y ago
Once the beancounters discover that you can make money with a piece of software, the game is over.
andylynch 4y ago
Microsoft also had MindAlign, which was an excellent no-nonsense group chat originally spun off from UBS (!) and widely liked by its users at various big firms, mostly banks- basically it was like IRC with management tools and record keeping added to meet compliance and audit needs. Bits got folded into Lync/ Skype for Business but those were never as good and certain customers are still using the original product.
- xmcqdpt2 4y ago
  I work at a bank and we currently (but for how long??) use Symphony which is "Slack but for finance" https://symphony.com/ https://symphony.com/ It's way better than teams in core features, although integrations are missing, and it doesn't have call functionality.
  - andylynch 4y ago
    Goldmans’ response to Bloomberg reporters looking at stuff they shouldn’t have… Symphony is pretty good. It does have video calling but I think many customers opt not to use it.
ekianjo 4y ago
Skype for business is just a rebranded Lync it has nothing to do with the Skype for consumers.

twobitshifter 4y ago

I started a new job and decided to go all in on using o365, including keeping notes in onenote. They’re launching a new version next month and I’m hoping that things go in the right direction and they keep the features i’ve just started to use.

vadym909 4y ago
The innocence is so cute in this one
dismalpedigree 4y ago
I wish you well, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
314 4y ago
Sweet summer child
marvinvz 4y ago
I signed into o365 a few days ago and it recommended a random excel file of a completely unrelated department to me. Not sure why an office application needs to "recommend" files.
- Mindwipe 4y ago
  Indeed. The Sharepoint app for iOS is particularly fun for this. I have gone to the trouble of installing a Sharepoint application. The idea that people are doing this who do not want a directory tree as 99.99999% of what they do is insane.

peteradio 4y ago

> Just try to get it to not start at login... God, why do PMs push this crap. Like users are picking their communication software of the day based on what pops up into their face.

bluGill 4y ago
Communication software needs to run in case someone wants to contact you. It should start in the background though.
- jknoepfler 4y ago
  Communications software needs to run when and only when I want it to run. Who in the heck are you to tell me when to run an application on a device I own?
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    Thank you, we need more of this mentality. I am in charge of my computer, not some tech company product manager 1,000 miles away. If I don't command my computer to run a program, it should not run it. If I don't think some company's messenger application should run in the background on startup, it should not run in the background on startup.
  - Kostic 4y ago
    Do you also start/stop the modem on your phone whenever you need it? For the majority of people it makes sense to have a comms app always running as they come to expect that from the smartphones. Granted, there should be an easy way to configure this behavior for advanced users.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      > Do you also start/stop the modem on your phone whenever you need it? Yes, I do (effectively). My phone spends a large percentage of the day in airplane mode.
    - 4y ago

philippejara 4y ago

It's kind of crazy to look back and see just how much worse we are today than some years ago with regards to this stuff. I remember an old social media named Orkut, had pretty much everything facebook had and more, also had a huge userbase in brazil and india(?) iirc, but just goot overtaken by facebook. Original skype would probably work better than zoom does today with a few tweaks(I assume, could be wrong there when it comes to joining calls without being "friends" and such). Never used communicator but I assume it would fill the role just as well by your description. Not even going to mention forums getting gutted and being replaced with discord servers that nobody uses voice(the reason i'd assume one would prefer to use a discord server). Cmmunities that didn't want to go for a forum had several "closed community" website creators(that I cannot for the life of me remember the names) and that all got replaced by subreddits... Quite sad to see the internet continuously being shrunk down to the lowest common denominator, some federated efforts like the fediverse make me quite hopeful, a shame most of them mimick twitter.

mig39 4y ago
Even crazier when you realize Orkut was owned by Google!
- midoridensha 4y ago
  That was the problem. Orkut was successful, but that doesn't stop Google from shutting down services. Trusting a Google service to be around long-term is folly unless it's Maps or Gmail.
  - kareemsabri 4y ago
    I don't think Orkut was successful for Google, where success in measured in annual revenue in billions.
    - flakeoil 4y ago
      I guess that's what the parent comment meant. Google tries many new products (in-house developed or acquired). If it does not reach a user base of several 100 million users (or 10's of billions of revenue) after a few years then they will scrap it.

kbrannigan 4y ago

Those messenger programs were ahead of their time. Even today they feel modern. I still remember the jingle : " ta-dat-dat " with the screen shaking. The tube monitors with that square screens, that could heat a whole room.

stevenhuang 4y ago
Nudges IIRC they were called. I remember using cheat engine and sending infinite nudges to friends. Good times.

drewcoo 4y ago

Microsoft had several different non-interoperable message apps, including two named "Messenger." Those golden days didn't look so shiny when we were there. Luckily, there was Pidgin/Adium, so we could have one app to talk all the protocols.

mBVth4DiupvBPY4 4y ago
I'm not sure what you're referring to with two non-interoperable message apps named Messenger? There was MSN Messenger/.NET Messenger/Windows Messenger/Windows Live Messenger, but those were interoperable (they were the same thing, just updates). They also managed to wrangle compatibility with Yahoo Messenger (although by then no one I knew still used Yahoo), and apparently Facebook Messenger, and then did a crappy merger/migration to Skype. I'd go back to those days in a heartbeat, and I was there.
- coredog64 4y ago
  NT had a built in messenger service that operated on named pipes. It was one of those services you disabled as soon as you could.
  - merb 4y ago
    net send *
  - pdntspa 4y ago
    I got into so much trouble as a kid for abusing that...
  - virgulino 4y ago
    To be fair, it was a local network toy, more akin to "talk" or "finger" in Unix.
prpl 4y ago
Trillian before that

barnabee 4y ago

They also bought (and ruined) MindAlign which had originally been developed and spun off from UBS investment bank and was light years ahead of its time. What they turned it into / replaced it with was such a depressing step backwards.

pasc1878 4y ago
Well that was just a nice GUI on top of IRC, and probably some work on the server.
Jaruzel 4y ago
Yup, MindAlign was born out of an internal product in UBS called 'Interchange'. Interchange was a java client, that fundamentally spoke standard IRC to IRC servers, but also used extra external databases to auto-connect users to channels and secure sensitive channels. The client also forced real names (via Active Directory), and was hardcoded to only connect to the UBS IRC servers. The IRC servers themselves were altered to only allow Interchange clients to connect[1] and to only allow approved bots in channels most of which did full chat logging for compliance purposes. Interchange was so slow it was nicknamed 'Interchug'. The IRC server network spanned the UBS WAN network globally, and all staff were encouraged to use it. For the era, no other large banking corporate had anything similar running (officially). Source: I worked in UBS IT during this period. --- [1] Although the more enterprising of us just HEX edited mIRC to report the Interchange client name.
- pasc1878 4y ago
  I think Interchange was not originally Java but a NeXTStep application. I am also ex UBS. I don't remember it being slow though.= but then again I might not have used the Java version just NeXTStep and the mIRC hack.
  - Jaruzel 4y ago
    Did you and I ever cross paths ? Wondering now if I know you ;)

datavirtue 4y ago

An ancient version of Skype for Business is embedded into my old gaming rig. I have tried on several occasions over the years to nuke it but I could never be bothered to break out a debugger and a process analyzer to get to the root cause. It still opens on every restart. I don't even think Microsoft knows how to remove it.

mildchalupa 4y ago
Same

virgulino 4y ago

Not to forget that 26 years ago, starting in 1996, we had Microsoft NetMeeting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_NetMeeting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_NetMeeting A very good VOIP / videoconferencing / white-boarding / application sharing client present on almost all Windows computers, open standards interoperable, with an official ActiveX Control and public API. You could easily embed it into your HTML site (IE compatible only), or drag and drop it into your Visual Basic / Delphi / Microsoft Office script application and thus effortlessly embed and control the functionality into your own website/application. https://youtu.be/B8wH5pRcWts https://youtu.be/B8wH5pRcWts https://news.microsoft.com/1996/09/30/microsoft-ships-netmeeting-sdk-provides-standards-based-platform-for-developing-conferencing-solutions-for-the-internet/ https://news.microsoft.com/1996/09/30/microsoft-ships-netmee...

stephenhuey 4y ago
When I started enjoying a blazing fast connection at Rice University in 1998, I frequently enjoyed MS Netmeeting video calls with friends who were scattered across the country. Within a few years it was a distant memory, and it surprises me how it was well over a dozen years before reliably easy video calls became commonplace.
asciimov 4y ago
It's been a long time since I heard mention of NetMeeting. I remember using NetMeeting in late 97 or early 98 on a 33.6 kbps modem. One of the most memorable parts was the area were you could find other random people to chat with on audio. I had many enjoyable conversations with various people on there, something that I don't think would work well today with the increased number of horrible netizens.
- verinus 4y ago
  I remember NetMeeting from around 2000 when we used it to at university to do shared desktop sessions for some team assignments... worked pretty well as far as I remember.

kevin_b_er 4y ago

"Skype for Business" was just a rebranded Lync. Consumer-land skype remained a different thing until Microsoft killed that for Teams. Skype for Business' exe was lync.exe right up until the end. "Teams" was a brand new thing and didn't use the Communicator/Lync/Skype for Business architecture.

cuteboy19 4y ago
>Skype for Business' exe was lync.exe right up until the end What do you mean "end"? We still use it!
- nikau 4y ago
  I miss skype, only because there was a pidgin plugin that allowed you to use a nice lightweight and snappy client.
- cube00 4y ago
  It's now end of life for Teams, there's no chance they'll rename the exe at this point. You'll be lucky to get anything except the most critical bugs fixed.
weberer 4y ago
Then why does it say "Skype is using the microphone" In the KDE taskbar when on a Teams call?

thekingofrome 4y ago

TIL people in the US use SMS

JohnFen 4y ago
SMS is universal and free in the US, and you don't have to juggle a bunch of different messaging services.
shadowofneptune 4y ago
Why don't people use it elsewhere? I know that WhatsApp is dominant, but why?
- conradfr 4y ago
  A combination of less iPhone dominance, different data/sms rates and other factors.
- ithinkso 4y ago
  Hard to say, they were all the rage and suddenly just kinda stopped being used (their only purpose now I believe is 2FA, and spam). One reason I can think of is chat history syncing between devices
- Valakas_ 4y ago
  Let me turn that around to answer your question: Why isn't the technology behind SMS used for internet?
- doix 4y ago
  It's really convenient for travel, you don't need to pay international rates for SMS, just connect to free wifi and you're golden. If/When you buy a local SIM card, people can still reach how they used too, they don't need to text a new number. When you change your number for some reason, you don't need to message everyone that you have a new number etc.
- mr_mitm 4y ago
  Unlimited texting plans were rare in some parts of the world. If you need to pay 9 cents per text, WhatsApp is a godsend. I even had to pay for receiving texts or pay a premium on sending texts when being abroad (which happens much more often in Europe). My understanding is that during the same time period, unlimited texting in the USA was pretty much expected. Luckily, we now have free roaming in the EU, so we don't have to worry about extra charges when using the mobile internet, but I still have to be careful when visiting Switzerland (which, again, is just a 2h drive for me).

blendergeek 4y ago

You forgot that MS also bought GroupMe and it somehow still exists.

thejackgoode 4y ago

I don’t know which universe you live in, but things like Microsoft Communicator/Lync and “worked very well” do not belong to the same sentence in mine.

tdeck 4y ago
I too remember Lync being incredibly buggy. It's probably the least reliable chat software I've ever used.

mindracer 4y ago

I had to support live meeting in a 80k seat org at the time and it was an awful piece of software. Quite often it would fail to launch, the Outlook plugin would fail to load. You could spend hours playing with registry settings, app config trying to get the plug-in to launch. Live meeting was terrible and deserves to be fired into the sun.

phreack 4y ago

What's hilarious and sad is that MSN Messenger had a lot of features back in the early '00s that major players like WhatsApp and Telegram now only implement through gritted teeth, one every year if you're lucky. Things like custom emojis, audio messages, sending a drawing, avatars you could see, choosing your display name, exportable conversation history, you even had games! Nowadays people cheer for the bare minimum in UX that we already had 20 years ago. And that's ignoring that niche it filled where people were identified by emails, and the particular social rules of knowing that if you went online, it meant you wanted to spend a while talking to people and were available to do so. Discord is kind of similar in that last aspect, but it's enormously complex for the average user and intended for servers, not for 1 on 1 conversations with your contacts. I've always wanted to build a clone of Messenger just because of how much I miss it.

djtango 4y ago
Right but WhatsApp solved a very different problem in the beginning - how do I send a message to someone who isn't online right now (or has a flaky connection). THAT was what was needed for mobile devices. I remember trying to use MSN messenger when I was on WAP and it sucked. And then I remember Skype on iPhone sucked for messages too. SMS also wasn't great if you were remotely international and had friends and family not in the same country as you. It took two whole years for Skype to rearchitect away from peer to peer (understandably so). To this day, when you want guaranteed delivery, in order and without duplicates WhatsApp runs circles around its competitors. Compare that with Slack which both on desktop and mobile regularly has weird issues with successfully delivering a message. Ultimately avatars are nice to have and later on top of a reliable messaging service but otherwise I'd take boring old text over flaky rich messaging every day of the week.
- hansel_der 4y ago
  > To this day, when you want guaranteed delivery, in order and without duplicates WhatsApp runs circles around its competitors. idk about slack et.al. but telegram does that with native clients for linux, android, ios and windows. even media-sync is pretty much flawless ime.
- 4y ago

Galanwe 4y ago

> Then they bought Skype and it went downhill from there. I don't know what happened, but they took a lot of time integrating technologies from Skype (peer-to-peer) with their own tech (which was more telecom/server based) I was at Skype at the time, working on this very migration, so maybe I can shed some light on what happened. There were a number of failures (on Microsoft part mainly) that made the whole thing collapse: - The original Skype developers were used to program in C++ with on-premise Linux servers. When the migration plan came in, the tech stack switched to C# on Azure. Most developers were not really keen or experienced working with C# and Windows. Azure was very much beta at the time, I remember the philosophy was "eat your own dog food" which created an insane amount of frustration working with sub-par tooling, little to no documentation, plenty of bugs on Azure. There is also a mentality/philosophy shift of working with C#/Windows coming from C++/Linux which was not great for team morale. - Support for group chat was paramount, which meant there was a need of transition from peer to peer to client server. - The original Lync team was very much annoyed with the rebranding and migration plan and was not really keen on helping Skype developers. I remember us receiving a "dump" of the Lync VCS as tech reference, in the form of a big fat multi GB archive. There were tons of binaries, even videos in there... Lot of fun... - MS/Lync used a _huge_ amount of proprietary SIP extensions to have Lync work. - The migration to the cloud and client-server model was accompanied by a huge migration to a brand new microservices in C# project. It meant recoding everything in a new language, a new platform, a new protocol, dealing with hundreds of half baked microservices in a half baked cloud platform. It was slow, buggy, and an architect astronaut fest. - Overall 99% of the original Skype calling team resigned and joined Twilio. - Pretty much every manager from MS that I have seen at Skype stayed no more than a year then rotated to a new role, at one point we had 4 changes of management in 2 years. - Every single interaction with Microsoft management was surreal. Pardon my language, but they were not technical at all, unable to understand the most basic architecture proposals, bullshitting tech talk 9 words out of 10,and overall they were living in an other planet in terms of market share and branding. You could definitely tell that they were talking "product" and "objectives" for Skype, but never used it, understand it's competition, challenges, etc. Pure bozos. In the end I think Microsoft still extracted some value from Skype, mainly: - Skype had good PSTN contracts worth a lot of value. The matching engine to select the cheaper one dynamically had value too, and historical data. - The brand itself had value for customers.

forty 4y ago

It's funny, I have used Communicator/Lync and I remember everyone hated it, including the CEO which was a MS fan, which was the reason why we started using it in the first place. I remember it not being even able to sync presence status properly. We switched quickly to Hipchat, which was not great, but felt like an improvement at the time ^^

baby 4y ago

It's really crazy how everyone had MSN back when I was younger. It was great, it had webcam stuff, personalization of font size and colors and such, plenty of emoticons, and even GAMES! I can't believe they managed to kill this amazing product. I do feel like FB is being killed in the same way, as it was an amazing product for many years and has slowly become ads and unrelated content in a noisy newsfeed :( I really think FB should go back to its roots and simplify the interface and go back to the chronological timeline. I don't understand why product feel that they need to change to stay relevant. They should just launch other products instead of changing what works well.

przemub 4y ago
It's because it's not enough any more to have a company with a stable source of income; investors expect a stable increase of income.

KronisLV 4y ago

> Then they bought Skype and it went downhill from there. I still remember older versions of Skype, which felt usable and rock solid. I actually used some from I think http://www.oldversion.com/windows/skype/ http://www.oldversion.com/windows/skype/ back in the day for my personal stuff, because the reworked UI was just worse. But nowadays, I don't really care that much, whether I have to use Skype, Teams, Zoom, Slack, Discord, Jitsi, Mattermost, Rocket.Chat or something else - all of the communication tools out there feel viable, just none are excellent. That said, WhatsApp feels like it's an order of magnitude faster (on mobile) than Signal and Telegram somehow (privacy implications aside, it's still one of the more popular ways to chat with people in the EU), which I found interesting. Of course, it's generally for chatting, not necessarily team collaboration (where you'd want channels and workspaces). On the desktop, however, generally you're just dealing with packaged browser apps most of the time. I do feel like mentioning how nice having self-hostable non-cloud options is when you need them, be it Nextcloud Talk or the aforementioned Jitsi, Mattermost, Rocket.Chat or something else.

vasvir 4y ago
Matrix is a nice federated protocol and with its client element (formerly riot) https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/element https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/element both demonstrate some respect for user privacy boundaries. But since it is mostly a network effects game and the setup of keys may be somewhat of putting I am not very optimistic. Its' a shame though...

gertrunde 4y ago

Skype for Business (SfB) was not renamed Teams, the two products are completely unrelated, beyond Teams being a successor product to SfB. Although there was a little bit of integration between SfB and Skype, (and between SfB and Teams as well) - so could communicate from one to the other. Although Skype for Business Online was phased out in favour of Teams, the on-prem version still exists, probably for those customers that cannot/will not use Teams for regulatory/compliance reasons, and no end of life date has been announced for the on-prem version yet.

qsdf38100 4y ago

Text communcation with Lync was the same as MSN Messenger, super basic. No chat history, no channels. I wouldn't say it's any better than Teams.

wslh 4y ago

Don't forget the Microsoft acquisition of Groove Networks [1] which was a prescient, but failed, app in team collaboration with a P2P serverless approach. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groove_Networks?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groove_Networks?wprov=sfla1

Lutger 4y ago

Isn't teams just a reskinned SharePoint with messenging and conference capabilities added? Does it use tech from the Skype acquisition? I do remember everybody using Skype, it was so popular it created a verb of its own, we used to skype with each other. Microsoft paid what was an enormous amount for it back then, then basically let it rot. Really surprising.

JohnFen 4y ago
> Microsoft paid what was an enormous amount for it back then, then basically let it rot. They didn't just let it rot. They actively ruined it.
Jaruzel 4y ago
Every "team" you make in Teams is a SharePoint site on the backend. Every "channel' under a "team" is a sub-folder on the SharePoint site. Each time you upload files to a "channel" via the "files" tab, it goes into the Documents area on that SharePoint site[1]. The exception for this, is private channels (the ones with little padlocks next to their names). These are created in their own isolated SharePoint site outside of the parent "teams" SharePoint site. It's done this way because the access security around teams/channels is the SharePoint security system. It's a totally nuts way to do it. Teams is basically built using existing MS technologies in the same way that incorrect LEGO bricks can be forced together if you try hard enough. I don't think MS have the ability to build an application from ground up anymore. --- [1] The one upside of this, is that if you only care about the files held in Teams, you can "Sync" the site to your PC, and it appears as a virtual folder in File Explorer.

classified 4y ago

Once the beancounters discover that you can make money with a piece of software, the game is over.

andylynch 4y ago

Microsoft also had MindAlign, which was an excellent no-nonsense group chat originally spun off from UBS (!) and widely liked by its users at various big firms, mostly banks- basically it was like IRC with management tools and record keeping added to meet compliance and audit needs. Bits got folded into Lync/ Skype for Business but those were never as good and certain customers are still using the original product.

xmcqdpt2 4y ago
I work at a bank and we currently (but for how long??) use Symphony which is "Slack but for finance" https://symphony.com/ https://symphony.com/ It's way better than teams in core features, although integrations are missing, and it doesn't have call functionality.
- andylynch 4y ago
  Goldmans’ response to Bloomberg reporters looking at stuff they shouldn’t have… Symphony is pretty good. It does have video calling but I think many customers opt not to use it.

ekianjo 4y ago

Skype for business is just a rebranded Lync it has nothing to do with the Skype for consumers.