

Microsoft Messenger will be retired and users migrated to Skype on March 15 - AhtiK
http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2013/01/09/microsoft-emails-messenger-users-to-let-them-know-the-service-is-retiring-on-march-15-and-to-upgrade-to-skype/

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andyking
My Windows phone has access to Live Messenger baked-in.

I never use it (I use Skype IM on the computer) but it's there, showing my
status as "available," allowing me to publish a custom status message, check-
in to places, and all the usual functionality.

It's a cheap model, and attempting to get Skype from the Marketplace results
in a "your phone doesn't have enough memory to run this app" error.

Does this mean that I'll not be able to use instant messaging from the phone
at all now? I'm not interested in the voice/video features of Skype on my
mobile, but I do use Skype IM and it'd be nice to use it mobile.

Or - will I be able to use Skype IM from the phone without needing an extra
app, instead of WLM?

~~~
hresult
You fell victim of Microsoft's "upgrade" policy. Either upgrade your phone
(ideally something than Microsoft's).

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josteink
Anyone have any idea what will happen to the various XMPP MSN-proxies used to
hook your gtalk account up to MSN etc?

I'd love to have the same for Skype, but last time I checked, Skype had them
all (all unofficial clients) banned...

~~~
shmerl
That's a good question. MS started to move in the right direction with XMPP
support, even though they didn't get up to supporting federation. If that will
be dropped - it would be just another proliferation of the isolated IM
networks.

~~~
Zash
According to [http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2013/01/micros...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2013/01/microsoft-messenger-service-not-going-anywhere-just-yet/)
they will drop XMPP support.

------
AhtiK
Users who log into Skype with their Microsoft account are offered a merge with
the Skype account to have all the MSN and Skype contacts combined.

The fun bit is the last step: "From now on, please use your Microsoft account
"Firstname Lastname" to sign into Skype" -- I was afraid to test this but
looks like the Skype account gets deleted after this step and you have to use
myname@hotmail.com when sharing your Skype details.

EDIT: Turns out that both Skype and Microsoft accounts will remain working in
parallel. One can log in with either of these (at least from desktop Skype
clients).

~~~
Lewisham
My guess is this message means Microsoft are looking to retire Skype accounts
in favor of Live accounts only, which makes sense to me.

------
eel
I wonder if they are they retiring the old messenger protocol as well.
Currently, I use Pidgin with my Live Messenger account, but perhaps that will
stop working come March 15th.

~~~
AhtiK
Yes, Pidgin will stop working. I'm not aware of any Skype IM clients other
than Skype itself.

~~~
astrodust
This is why using Skype isn't practical. Do you really want to have that
gigantic app open all the time?

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Well, you have a choice. Skype for Windows Desktop, or Skype for Windows 8.

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UnoriginalGuy
It is a shame in the sense that it makes this tiny market even smaller. In
fact the video-messenger market is now so small Skype and Google+ Hangouts are
really the only viable competition (in the consumer space). I guess we also
have FaceTime but Apple has made that Mac/iOS only which really limits its
viability.

Kind of scares me considering how much I depend on this technology and how
often Skype seems to break/fail/have issues. Also don't look forward to being
forced to "merge" my Skype account into a Windows Account.

I honestly don't understand why this market isn't competitive? Is it patents
on the streaming technology? Is it just how unreliable web-cameras are? Is it
the cost of deploying the infrastructure?

~~~
mtgx
I think a lot of people use Yahoo Messenger for video-calls, but that number
may be waning. I wouldn't worry too much about it. I think WebRTC will disrupt
all proprietary video-calling products, or at the very least it will force
them all to work through WebRTC and be inter-operable, which would still be a
major win for users.

I expect Microsoft to be the very last one to adopt it, though. They probably
won't even support it in IE until IE11 next year, at least.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Sadly there's a good chance that Apple will put up a strong fight to be the
last to support it.

------
schabernakk
I hope they take this event as motivation to fix a few issues with skype.

1) Send messages to offline contacts. If they try to replace a messenger
application this is a must. So far I always thought this isnt a wanted feature
as skype is mainly thought of as a video chat application.\

2) Read/Unread messages. Syncing which messages are read/unread over multiple
devices doesnt work at all. If I have a couple of conversations on one pc and
i later turn on my laptop, I drown in all the skype new message notifications.
Plus there is some weird behaviour here sometimes with old messages. Few days
ago I got a new message notification for something I received at least a year
ago and havent looked at since.

------
clauretano
Does this mean that Skype - Lync Online (Office 365) federation will be live
by then? Right now Messenger is the only outside service organizations using
Lync Online are allowed to federate to (IM and presence only) [1].

I know plans have been in the work for a long time now to add Skype
federation, but something seems to have stalled it --perhaps that 600M+ Skype
users is a scary federation partner to a service a couple orders of magnitude
smaller.

[1]: [http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-
us/office365-enterprises/...](http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-
us/office365-enterprises/hh416763.aspx)

------
djt
66 days isn't a lot of time. For a start up I can understand, but from MS I
thought they would give people that arent happy with skype a chance to think
about it.

~~~
Pr0
I think this was first announced in November (not much more time, but at least
it's over 100 days). This is confirmation of the exact deadline. Edit: Yep,
that's what the article says and here's the HN discussion.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4753236>

~~~
djt
ah cool thanks for that, I didn't realise!

------
liuliu
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.

~~~
dpark
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.

~~~
liuliu
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.

~~~
dpark
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.

------
FreeFull
It doesn't seem to be possible to merge two Live Messenges accounts into one
Skype account. I have merged one of my accounts in, but I have two accounts in
order to separate people from different parts of my life. It also only seems
possible to launch one instance of the Skype client at one time. How am I
meant to continue using both accounts once Live Messenger goes away?

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Create another Skype account and merge it in, presumably.

~~~
FreeFull
You can't merge two Skype accounts though, and can only be signed into one at
a time

~~~
FreeFull
Turns out I'm wrong, you can run multiple instances of Skype using the
--secondary flag. Still less convenient than singly using one client

------
corin_
I did this on my work laptop and my home PC - the former went OK, I now have a
few duplicate contacts in Skype but that's no problem, however on the latter
my Skype only shows previous Skype contacts, no MSN contacts, meanwhile it
won't let me start up Messenger. So not too happy with their process right
now.

~~~
jetti
I did this on my work laptop as well. The process was painless, however, the
lack of interop with Live Messenger is quite frustrating. Not everybody in my
company has migrated so that means that if I want to add somebody still on
Messenger, I have to go to the live.com website and login to do it. I can't
add them in Skype. On top of that, I can't share files with people on
Messenger, which is super annoying. I hope that things get better in 66 days!

------
nvmc
I miss MSN chat. My friends have all long since migrated to Facebook. All I
want is instant messaging.

~~~
t_j_m
Download pidgin and login with your facebook account.

~~~
nvmc
The whole point was to avoid Facebook.

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xutopia
I expect that to go down poorly.

~~~
umjames
Is that because March 15th is the Ides of March?

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harryf
Would be interesting to know how many users are using MSN - seeing numbers
over 300 million reported in 2010. Wonder if Skype can handle the traffic?

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masto
What about the Kinect video chat? Isn't that based on Messenger? I would be
happy to see that change to Skype.

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simplyinfinity
To my amazement , Trilian has Skype support without the need of your Skype
runing. Go give it a try!

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0x0
Well I guess this means I won't have to worry for much longer why bitlbee
3.0.6 broke MSN.

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mikelat
I guess this is the end of skype support for linux?

I'll be moving to hangouts if that's the case.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Nope, Skype actually had a major version update (which was well overdue) for
Linux relatively recently, under MS ownership.

