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Comment by liuliu | Hacker News Reader

It would be most interesting to see a postmortem about why Live Messenger failed. As I can recall, it is a compelling product against AOL and Yahoo! IM. It is also competitive globally (well, I mean the U.S. and China). It has a competitive web existence for a long time as well (MSN Spaces), and its status update was, basically, the grandfather of Twitter / Facebook status.

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It didn't fail. To the best of my understanding, it's a very successful project.

What happened is that Microsoft bought Skype, and it clearly feels that of the two brands, Skype is the more valuable (for what they paid, it better be). Having two brands of instant messengers (and two code bases, etc.) with the same target market is redundant, so one of them is being retired.

Not growing is, in itself, a failure. Live Messenger had a chance to become what is SNS today at its time. But several missteps followed and a year ago, it closed its web existence (to Wordpress), and now this.

That's a creative use of the term "failure". Messenger is "failing" with an order of magnitude (or two) more users than most successful online products have.

Live Messenger had essentially become irrelevant long before the Skype purchase. Most of my contact list had moved to gtalk, and of course for a lot of people in the in-Facebook functionality replaced it.

I wouldn't call a product with 300+ million active users irrelevant. However, it wasn't on a significantly upward trajectory anymore.

Google was very smart to tightly (and smoothly) integrate its chat service into its mail service. They did an excellent job leveraging a successful product to turn what was basically a me-too product into another very successful product. Ditto for Facebook, I guess, although I think they were actually pretty late to the game, considering how obvious a fit it was.

I have to be a little skeptical about Microsoft's claims. I was one of those active users in that I'd registered my hotmail account when I installed Windows 7, and Messenger came along for the ride - as with tens if not hundreds of millions of others - however it had long been replaced with other services.

Not least because it became more and more obnoxious. It was a very self-important little IM.

I'm confused. Were you logging in every month to a product you didn't use? If not, you weren't in the active users set.

You aren't confused, though apparently that is sarcastic?

Windows 7 automatically logs into Messenger if you follow the default behaviour and associate your hotmail account.

I wasn't being sarcastic. I was legitimately asking what the scenario is that would have you logging into Messenger on a regular basis while never using it.

I'm still not clear what scenario has you logging into Messenger automatically on Windows 7. Were/are you running the Messenger client? I'm not aware of any Win7 SKU that shipped with Messenger. That's part of Windows [Live] Essentials. Maybe some OEMs shipped with this preinstalled? I don't recall Windows 7 by itself ever asking me to provide it with my LiveId/Microsoft Account.

It's Windows 8 that does it. Windows 7 and earlier require Windows Essentials to be installed.

Did it fail, or is Microsoft just saying "why do we have two brands for the same product?"

It's widely used in Latin America. AOL and Yahoo! IM were almost never used there, and MSN had almost all the marketshare a few years ago (before people started using Google Talk and Facebook).

It failed in the same sense Myspace failed: didn't adapt, and something better/cooler/trendier came along. Facebook ate the market for teenagers instant messaging, and Gmail crushed hotmail.

Besides, its popularity was, like everything else, depending on countries. When I was a teenager in France, nobody had ever heard of Yahoo! or AOL IM. Everybody was on MSN, with ICQ a far, "geeky", second.

Their status updates started with changeable display names. People kept using their display name as statuses.

Who knows why none of the IM products expanded into social networks. They basically did what facebook did well before facebook existed.

There was MSN web messenger and it was fantastic. I guess they never went as far as making your conversations more permanent or merging them with your profile (and to be fail, there would have been user outcry if your one-off private conversations were suddenly held forever)

I think at the time before facebook/twitter/etc., solving the scaling problem was much harder. I recall reading something years and years ago about how they wanted to have celebrity accounts that you could add as a friend, but solving the problem of "britney spears logs on and notifies 1M accounts" was too expensive.

For example, see here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mayurk/archive/2005/03/22/400685.asp...

In 2005, the contact limit was doubled to 300. There are probably hard technical reasons why they couldn't have social networks like twitter and facebook do today.

I think we're seeing maturity of the IM market, and a phase of consolidation. It was always crazy that there were five or six separate networks doing the same thing.

I think Live Messenger(the product) succeeded immensely with tens of millions of users. However, Live Messenger(the business) failed. People don't like to click on ads, and the server and engineering costs are non trivial.

I don't think AOL, Yahoo Messenger, Gtalk or Google+ hangouts, FaceTime are making any money(if they're not losing money i.e). Notice how each one of them is owned by a megacorp and is/was part of a bigger ecosystem that subsidizes it.

I even wonder if Skype is a viable business by itself, though they have Skype credits for calling regular phones.

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