A few years back, MSN Messenger (later called Windows Live Messenger) was the most popular instant messaging agent. Then it died. What caused the death of MSN? 1 reason: stop updating the damn program! The main issue with MSN Messenger is that MSN always kept making new versions of the messenger.. and made old versions obsolete and dysfunctional… forcing users to download the new versions. People got sick of it, specially that the newer versions were at times inferior to the previous versions. For example, in my opinion, the best version of MSN Messenger was the one that included the hand-write tool. That was such a fun tool. In the later version, this feature was totally removed! Not only that, but the old MSN emoticons were iconic! They were so expressive, they perfectly captured the emotion you wanted to express. They were the perfect emoticons… but they were all replaced by crappy new versions in the later version on MSN. The new emoticons sucked big time; they were very ugly compared to the old ones. Furthermore, they were totally not as expressive as the old ones… you almost couldn’t tell a frown from a smile anymore. I believe those were the initial reasons for the death of MSN. Shortly after, Facebook chat was born. It was crappy and unreliable in the beginning… but then started improving and becoming more reliable, while MSN was getting crappier. Then smartphones were born, Blackberry’s BBM was born, and many instant messaging clients were born, Whatsapp being the most popular of them. Before you knew it, MSN Messanger was dead. It’s a shame how giant brands build perfect products, then through stupid unnecessary “innovation” to the worse, they commit suicide and kill their own products. Let us know if you have anything else to add about the death of MSN Messenger.
Microsoft announced the official death of MSN messenger / Windows Live Messenger and replaced it with Skype. http://www.skype.com
