
Chat Wars: Microsoft vs. AOL (2014) - ingve
https://nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/
======
aylons
This is a great article. Ok, I skipped the parts where he explain how computer
works and the history of MS, but I loved how he goes from the internal working
of Messenger to the higher level problems in MS.

On the other side, does anyone have a good, encompassing explanation to why
AOL was a such a systematic value destroyer? I always read about MS structural
problems, but not AOL's.

Nullsoft (Winamp), Mirabilis (ICQ) and Netscape (Navigator) quickly come to
mind, but I guess there's more, including their own ecosystem with keywords
and promotional websites.

Fact is, after an AOL acquisition, everything stopped evolving. Maybe not
Netscape, but it lagged behind, still. Anyone?

~~~
seanp2k2
Does this not also happen with most acquisitions in general? Look at all the
companies Google has bought; how many of them have the actually done something
with which has turned into a profitable arm of the business?

~~~
outside1234
Google buys a lot of companies for their bodies, not their products.

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scurvy
I had some of my best years working on the operations side of Messenger. I
learned a lot from David, Jonathan, Yikang (and a few others whose names I
can't remember). We did some very cool things that were ahead of our time.
Sorry to hear about the morale issues. MSN was never given a fair shake by MS.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane David. -Your buddy sending you all those
CS and SB stack traces.

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Animats
Further back, there was Compuserv email, MCI email, UUCP email, and, for a
privileged few, Internet email. None of those interoperated, annoying users.
The proprietary ones all died or learned to interoperate.

Now we have Instagram messaging, Snapchat messaging, Twitter direct messages,
etc. The vendors want lock-in, but it's a pain for users. Will we ever get
messaging convergence?

~~~
seanp2k2
We could have done it with XMPP between Facebook and Google, but that never
happened due to some reasons:
[http://www.disruptivetelephony.com/2015/02/google-finally-
ki...](http://www.disruptivetelephony.com/2015/02/google-finally-kills-off-
googletalk-and-xmpp-jabber-integration.html)

[http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/2010/02/a-request-for-
federatio...](http://aaron-kelley.net/blog/2010/02/a-request-for-
federation-s2s-support-on-facebook-chat-xmpp/)

AIM also had XMPP support for a bit:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20110522092331/http://www.aim.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20110522092331/http://www.aim.com/xmpp)

As did MSN Messenger:
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP) (in
"History" section; sorry, can't dig up link from archive.org ATM )

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paulbjensen
I once worked at AOL (2010-2012). I remember that we were told that we
couldn't use AIM for work purposes, and instead were using Yammer and HipChat.

It boggles the mind how a company with a chat product ends up using 2
competing products instead of its own offering.

~~~
Macha
I worked there in 2014 as an intern. We definitely used aim but another
department used Skype.

------
TheGRS
Wonderful article, even if the mid section gets a little too detailed about
the history of MS and the understanding of programming abstraction layers.

Looking back on the past and being able to relay your day-to-day life like
that into a story is very cool.

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shmerl
How much effort and time could be saved if instead of "chat wars" they'd
worked on shared standard for instant messaging? The irony is that even today
they don't. Some just never learn.

~~~
zedadex
Even Google's moving away from XMPP (last I heard) with hangouts. I was
surprised when I found out the best thing I'd get in terms of being able to
talk to hangouts would be revengineering the protocol, a la hangups
([https://github.com/tdryer/hangups](https://github.com/tdryer/hangups))

~~~
shmerl
Google turned sour with Eric Schmidt leading all this "social" effort there.
So interoperability was thrown out with excuse that "others don't care". Of
course opening up Hangouts and making it a IETF standard as an obvious
alternative wasn't done either, which only highlights the hypocrisy of that
excuse.

------
tsunamifury
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
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...

~~~
tsunamifury
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
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
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)

~~~
notahacker
The 330m user stat might not have been that impressive; Facebook was well on
course to surpass it by then, but even as late as 2010 MSN/Live Messenger was
apparently sending 9Bn daily messages from 1.5bn daily conversations. Which -
I must admit I was surprised by this - is a _lot_ more than Twitter boasts
today. If those stats are evidence of failure to offer anything to the market
I can only assume you don't regard the next generation of consumer startups
that highly either.

I'm not sure what additional value pioneering MSN users would have discovered
from not being able to communicate with people using AIM, but I guess we'll
have to agree to disagree on that. At the time I found it a perfectly adequate
chat client which my friends and I used exclusively, but I reiterate that I am
open to suggestions of better ways for MS to have kickstarted the process of
acquiring 230 million users in two years straddling the turn of the century.

They robbed themselves of the chance of success because they didn't really
have many ideas of what to do with all those users beyond try to drive them to
their web portal or sell them emoticons, but for the time they managed
seriously impressive growth and totally dominated the market.

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jmkni
I remember reading this when it was first published, really nice article!

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yuhong
This reminds me that MS was developing OS/2 2.0 and NT OS/2 back when the
Morris worm spread in late 1988. Yes, I am talking about the decision to use a
flat address space on x86.

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option_greek
An interesting read. Especially the parts where he figures out the
'gobbledygook' :)

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acak
Thank you. Articles like this make coming to HN on a Sunday morning worth it.

