Microsoft Shutting Down MSN Messenger After 15 Years of Service

New submitter airfuz writes Microsoft took a bold move announcing that users have to move away from the old version of Internet Explorer to the new version 11. And now not long after that, Microsoft announced that they are shutting down the 15-year-old MSN Messenger. Most people have moved away from the service to Facebook and other mobile based messengers such as Whatsapp, and so MSN is left with few users. But still, ending a 15-year messaging service like the MSN Messenger means something to the ones who grew up using it.

Uh

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't it already shut down a couple of years ago, with mandatory migration to Skype?

Re:merger with Skype

[Krakadoom]

"Isn't MSN and Skype supposed to be merged??" Indeed, however, it was possible to keep using the MSN client, if you - like myself - loathed the Skype client for the buggy, cumbersome, un-intuitive piece of poo that it is. I'm not sure if the Skype and MSN infrastructure was merged, though, but since they're now announcing a shutdown I suppose it wasn't.

Re:The ones who grew up using MSN?

[mikael_j]

Where I grew up IRC was actually popular with the non-nerd crowd until ICQ came around, then that became the "standard" until some time around 2002-2003 when MSN Messenger started taking over more and more and remained the top IM client until Facebook became the one social networking platform to rule them all.

Amazingly enough America Online was never very popular outside the US...

NET SEND

[lucm]

I remember we were having a blast with NET SEND at the office, using it to talk shit between developers.

It allowed for short messages only (like twitter), and no incriminating evidence was left behind so no holds barred... Until we found out that each message is automatically logged by Windows and that the sysadmin we had made fun of in those messages had been reading our clever discussions for months... Good times!

Died after 6.5

[Anonymous Coward]

After MSNM 6.5, they ruined the client completely.

Back then, you could even have fun add-ons for MSN that could let you do fun stuff with names, display pictures.
Instead of working with the modding community, which was huge with MSN, they made MSNM 7 harder to mod, which killed off so many things.

Likewise that was just around the time they started slowly strangling the rest of the MSN Services, one by one, including one they could have made glorious, MSN Spaces.
But instead they continued to fight their OWN community until everyone else left it.

I think most are missing the politics.

[tlambert]

I think most are missing the politics.

This is surprising, coming as it does on the heels of Microsoft's refusal to comply with the U.S. Federal court order to hand over overseas held emails.

So I will spell out some of the political consequences here.

The service closure forces a service switch on the remaining people who were using non-Microsoft MSN clients and thus avoiding the Guangming, which operates the Chinese version of Skype, which has been modified "to support Internet regulations", which is to say The Great Firewall of China. If these users want comparable services, the only comparable one now available to them is Tencent’s QQ messaging software, which from the start has been designed "to support Internet regulations". So there are no longer any "too big to shoot in the head" options which do NOT "support Internet regulations".

So really the only people who care about this will be Chinese dissidents who want to communicate with each other using an encrypted channel through a server inaccessible to the Chinese government, and any journalists seeking an encrypted channel whereby they can move information out of China without having to have a government approved satellite uplink handy, or a willingness to smuggle out data storage some other way.

Re:Lucky Them

[spire3661]

WE want to see sanity return to development. Stop pushing out so many fucking updates. The software world needs to grow the fuck up and use proper development and deployment. Im tired of my constructs feeling like they are blowing in the wind. Build tools that will last for generations. We are fully into the Information Age, lets start acting like it. The constant changing landscape is akin to someone re-designing the wrench and bolt design every few years. It hard to build stuff on these shifting platforms.