4 ms·

The engineer here seems to see this competition as a bit of fun, but a product minded person would be in horror of how much time was wasted on a goal that added

The engineer here seems to see this competition as a bit of fun, but a product minded person would be in horror of how much time was wasted on a goal that added little or no value to the messenger product. competitors like Skype were building out new features like video conferencing or audio calling while these two were goofing off fighting over a relative small part of the communications pie. This rat holing left msn irrelevant by the time gtalk and Skype arrived on the scene.

notahacker 11y ago
This little battle took place three years before Skype existed, and being able to send messages to people using what was then the dominant messenging client added more value than just about anything else Microsoft could have spent those developer hours on; as integral to its growth as ensuring that Whatsapp worked with iOS updates. Yesterday someone challenged my post on Snapchat by suggesting that services with >100M users never failed to make significant revenue, and I just remembered how insanely popular these earlier clients were...
- RyJones 11y ago
  MSN Messenger made idiotic amounts of money with custom emoji packs. I don't know if it was significant - like, was MSNIM ever cash flow positive? Doubt it.
- tsunamifury 11y ago
  Those early clients barely had 30 million users and their daily actives were probably on the order of 20% of that. Whatsapp and Facebook messenger are approaching 1 billion users with daily actives at 70 to 80%. And far before that Skype trounced msn messenger. What I was trying to say is, they spent their time trying to get a piece of a pie that was ultimately irrelevant. It served little if any business purpose and trying to usurp AOL users to get a vanity metric was a form of self delusion. You need loyal, deeply rooted users who care about your product and your network. Trying to piggy back off someone else is applauded by short term people but you end up with a toxic and indifferent user base.
  - notahacker 11y ago
    They might have been barely 30M users in the late 90s but at a time when that constituted most people using the internet for chat, I'm genuinely baffled that you think it was a "vanity metric" rather than a significant product enhancement to be able to communicate with them. In fact, I'm struggling to think of anything more likely to bootstrap a base of loyal users than the ability to talk to basically everyone else using chat applications on the internet. Any suggestions? (FWIW I'm not convinced they could have developed a VOIP service that functioned well over 28.8kbps dialup modems in the few hours they spent reverse engineering the latest changes to AOL's chat protocol. But yeah, if their engineers were that good, it would have been a nice market to win) Since MSN (or Windows Live) claimed 330m monthlies by the late-noughties - far ahead of Skype's superior product - I'd also hazard that they had significant success with getting loyal, deeply rooted users, even if they had the help of it coming installed with Windows. That's far more users than Snapchat, and probably more than the number of actual humans using Twitter, so I don't think the unicorn comparisons are invalid. Obviously the management structure was a little different from todays' chat startups, and "sell to Facebook for $20Bn" wasn't a monetisation option, but it was certainly an early outlying success in growing an mostly-ephemeral communication network and an early notable failure at turning that user base into profit.
    - tsunamifury 11y ago
      Because if you were in the space you'd know that 330m monthlies is a worthless metric. This isn't a website, if those people are popping in once a month, they aren't really using it. MSN Messenger was never a success, and never really fit any strategic need or user need. They offered nothing to the market, and died when more useful products took their place with lower numbers but a more active, and valuable user base. (Skype). For all their work, I believe MSN messenger robbed themselves of the opportunity to discover their own value by trying to bootstrap someone elses success. Try to at least hear me out on this, because if think this is a good strategy to apply to a startup you are kidding yourself -- as a startup MSN messenger would have failed, and as an internal product it was also a significant failure (but one that took too long to be realized as such)
scurvy 11y ago
MSN Messenger had voice calling 2 years before Skype existed. I'm not sure where you're going here other than to blindly hate. MSN Messenger's DAU and simultaneous login count was pretty impressive for the size of the Internet back then.

notahacker 11y ago

This little battle took place three years before Skype existed, and being able to send messages to people using what was then the dominant messenging client added more value than just about anything else Microsoft could have spent those developer hours on; as integral to its growth as ensuring that Whatsapp worked with iOS updates. Yesterday someone challenged my post on Snapchat by suggesting that services with >100M users never failed to make significant revenue, and I just remembered how insanely popular these earlier clients were...

RyJones 11y ago
MSN Messenger made idiotic amounts of money with custom emoji packs. I don't know if it was significant - like, was MSNIM ever cash flow positive? Doubt it.
tsunamifury 11y ago
Those early clients barely had 30 million users and their daily actives were probably on the order of 20% of that. Whatsapp and Facebook messenger are approaching 1 billion users with daily actives at 70 to 80%. And far before that Skype trounced msn messenger. What I was trying to say is, they spent their time trying to get a piece of a pie that was ultimately irrelevant. It served little if any business purpose and trying to usurp AOL users to get a vanity metric was a form of self delusion. You need loyal, deeply rooted users who care about your product and your network. Trying to piggy back off someone else is applauded by short term people but you end up with a toxic and indifferent user base.
- notahacker 11y ago
  They might have been barely 30M users in the late 90s but at a time when that constituted most people using the internet for chat, I'm genuinely baffled that you think it was a "vanity metric" rather than a significant product enhancement to be able to communicate with them. In fact, I'm struggling to think of anything more likely to bootstrap a base of loyal users than the ability to talk to basically everyone else using chat applications on the internet. Any suggestions? (FWIW I'm not convinced they could have developed a VOIP service that functioned well over 28.8kbps dialup modems in the few hours they spent reverse engineering the latest changes to AOL's chat protocol. But yeah, if their engineers were that good, it would have been a nice market to win) Since MSN (or Windows Live) claimed 330m monthlies by the late-noughties - far ahead of Skype's superior product - I'd also hazard that they had significant success with getting loyal, deeply rooted users, even if they had the help of it coming installed with Windows. That's far more users than Snapchat, and probably more than the number of actual humans using Twitter, so I don't think the unicorn comparisons are invalid. Obviously the management structure was a little different from todays' chat startups, and "sell to Facebook for $20Bn" wasn't a monetisation option, but it was certainly an early outlying success in growing an mostly-ephemeral communication network and an early notable failure at turning that user base into profit.
  - tsunamifury 11y ago
    Because if you were in the space you'd know that 330m monthlies is a worthless metric. This isn't a website, if those people are popping in once a month, they aren't really using it. MSN Messenger was never a success, and never really fit any strategic need or user need. They offered nothing to the market, and died when more useful products took their place with lower numbers but a more active, and valuable user base. (Skype). For all their work, I believe MSN messenger robbed themselves of the opportunity to discover their own value by trying to bootstrap someone elses success. Try to at least hear me out on this, because if think this is a good strategy to apply to a startup you are kidding yourself -- as a startup MSN messenger would have failed, and as an internal product it was also a significant failure (but one that took too long to be realized as such)

scurvy 11y ago

MSN Messenger had voice calling 2 years before Skype existed. I'm not sure where you're going here other than to blindly hate. MSN Messenger's DAU and simultaneous login count was pretty impressive for the size of the Internet back then.