> I really wonder how they dropped the ball.

In my country, ICQ died when Microsoft started shipping MSN Messenger with Windows and worked hard to make people aware of it. (Microsoft even did a silly marketing campaign for MSN that involved a guy dressed as a butterfly). People used the Messenger that was already installed in their OS, and ICQ was history.

I believe the same thing happened in most other countries, because it only took a couple of years for all the foreign ICQ buddies I had to move off to MSN.