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Speaking of group chats, I recalled an interesting story how MSN Messenger lost Chinese market. Back in 2003ish, MSN Messenger was THE shit in China. QQ, the co
by g9yuayon 2y ago
Speaking of group chats, I recalled an interesting story how MSN Messenger lost Chinese market. Back in 2003ish, MSN Messenger was THE shit in China. QQ, the competitor of MSN Messenger by Tencent, was losing ground rapidly, especially to white-collar users in big cities. To Microsoft, MSN Messenger probably was a toy, but to Tencent it was life and death. So QQ launched group chat. In addition, QQ Group Chat allowed users to drop any images, including GIFs into a chat. And man, that feature killed. Hundreds of millions of users got hooked. It was just so much fun to be creative and spread memes using this features. In the meantime, what was MSN Messenger's response? Absolutely nothing. No, it's worse than nothing. It was insulting. If I dropped a gif to a chat, MSN Messenger would always convert the gif into a 8x8 icon, and sometimes turned that gif into a static image. BTW, I'm not sure why, but big techs in the US somehow couldn't get Chinese market. Case in point, the emojis in all the chat apps, be it Apple's or Meta's or Google's or whatever, are just ugly and not expressive, when compared to WeChat's, let alone QQ's. Of course, as a Chinese user I'm biased, but that's the point: very few Chinese natives like the emojis offered by western countries (and I guess vice versa).
And then, well, there's no "and then". The rest was history. MSN Messenger quickly became a niche and lost its user base. It made Chinese companies realized that they had a chance to out compete behemoths like Microsoft, by moving fast, by moving decisively, and by being creative to fit the psyche of Chinese market.
- mewse-hn 2y agoTo be fair MSN Messenger went on to lose the western market as well
- sureIy 2y agoI wonder whose fault that is exactly. Did it just get neglected or were PMs fighting against “technical limitations”? Sometimes supporting the new shiny feature means breaking the old one. If it’s not clear that the new one is a winner, some might hold onto the “better” (old) one and stale out. To me it’s insane how MSN Messenger and Skype got left out in the cold.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> very few Chinese natives like the emojis offered by western countries (and I guess vice versa) As a Westerner, the Tencent smileys are mostly better. On QQ they animate, which I don't like, but on Wechat they're static and they provide much better options than the Western set. I don't think there's ever been a good "looking skeptical" smiley anywhere, though. For some reason, Tencent semi-recently redid all their smileys in a much uglier style. I wish that hadn't happened.
- g9yuayon 2y ago> I don't think there's ever been a good "looking skeptical" smiley anywhere, though. There used to be one, a serious face that strokes its goatee. That emoji can be used to express doubts or "that's interesting" in a joking way. Not sure why that emoji disappeared.
- mlsu 2y agoThis lead me to google QQ's emoji set. Is this the one? https://www.emojiall.com/en/platform-qq https://www.emojiall.com/en/platform-qq If so, absolutely. Kinda seems like every East Asian emoji is more... expressive, cute, dynamic (?) than its western counterpart. I wonder why that is.
- g9yuayon 2y agoI haven't used QQ for years. Now that I look at them, somehow they look less interesting than what I had in memory. Maybe I'm subconsciously comparing them to WeChat's or many of the user-created variants.
- prmoustache 2y agoBecause western adult people like to draw a thicker line between childhood and adulthood I guess.