Microsoft Retiring Messenger, Replacing It With Skype 213
Entropy98 writes "Windows Live Messenger will be shut down by March 2013, after nearly 13 years of service, so Microsoft can focus its efforts on Skype, its recent $8.5bn acquisition. No word on whether users will be able to transfer their WLM accounts to Skype. 'According to internet analysis firm Comscore, WLM still had more than double the number of Skype's instant messenger facility at the start of this year and was second only in popularity to Yahoo Messenger. But the report suggested WLM's US audience had fallen to 8.3 million unique users, representing a 48% drop year-on-year. By contrast, the number of people using Skype to instant message each other grew over the period.'"
ICQ (Score:2, Interesting)
FTW
That's a surprise (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft's recent shocking displas of sense. (Score:1, Interesting)
Endeavors in mobile OS's aside, (Winphone8 / RT tablets are stillborn - Deal with it), Microsoft has been making some rather.. Un-microsoft like software moves lately.
They're getting rid of crap that nobody used or liked: .net - Not a supported framework for metro, winphone, winRT.
Dropping of the Live brand title - Which nobody liked.
Apparent abandonment of silverlight - Nobody liked it. Microsoft practically paid NBC and neflix to use it. Not supported in metro IE, winphone7, winphone8, winRT and never will be.
Apparent abandonment of
Their new stuff has cross platform support and is appears to be quite functional:
Live drive(Or whatver they're renaming it to) - Good, fast, low cost, apps available for andriod and iOS
Skype - Good, cheap, again cross platform apps available. Replacing crapfest windows messenger.
Hyper-V - Officially supports linux, drivers and support in main kernel tree.
Azure - Cloud platform officially supports linux.
Re:Facebook Chat killed it (Score:5, Interesting)
Uh.. I guess I'm nobody then. And so is my list of about 15 people I chat everyday on it with.
I like Windows Live Messenger.. it's simply, it doesn't suck like Skype, and it doesn't require Facebook. I use gTalk sometimes too, but that seems to be an Android user thing; people with iPhones rarely use gTalk, even when logged into GMail. As it is, this really pisses me off, because I really like Windows Live Messenger. It's going to be a real mess for me to find one way to talk to all these people after it goes away..
Impact on Microsoft Lync? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder what the impact is on Lync? I would guess it's based on Messenger to some extent.
Re:AOL wins! (Score:3, Interesting)
It (well, ICQ but same shit) was the first one over here. But then for whatever reason people switched to MSN.
Personally I belong in the camp who used IRC and never saw why I needed ICQ to begin with.
Re:Way to go MS (Score:2, Interesting)
And most people I know who use WLM use it for all sorts of things like play games together, share control of certain programs, do remote assistance with their parents, work on documents together because you can tie it with office. Plus, it has an enterprise version that connects with the entire office suite (most importantly outlook) and works with exchange and AD for some truly awesome features.
Re:Windows Live Messenger Integration (Score:4, Interesting)
Skype used to run fine on my netbook. It insists on updating itself - there's no way to stay on old versions. It got more and more sluggish with time - it took longer to launch and the video call quality decreased.
Now when I run it it pops up a message saying "Your computer speed is very slow"
http://community.skype.com/t5/Windows/Your-computer-speed-is-very-slow/td-p/385505 [skype.com]
Skype used to work fine on machines that were a lot more underpowered than a netbook even on connections that were a lot slower than my current 50Mbit down 8Mbit up DSL.
If you can't get crappy video in CIF-like [wikipedia.org] resolution to work over an 8Mbit uplink given a dual core Atom with SSE at 1.6Ghz, I'd say the word bloated is about right. Especially if, as I suspect in the Skype case, the problem is not that you don't have the CPU horsepower to compress the video but that the app wraps up efficient video codec into a large application such that the video codec bit gets starved out. Of course if you have a fast CPU you probably don't have this problem. Still older versions of Skype actually worked a lot better on the same hardware, and even older versions used to run perfectly with a slower CPU and a slower connection. And it's not like it's impossible to decouple the video codec from the rest of the application and run it at a higher priority.
Skype for whatever reason just decided to put up a passive aggressive warning was easier than making their software work on netbooks when they found the issue during testing (why else was the warning code put in?). Even though realistically a lot more people are going to run Skype on a netbook than on a developer class laptop.
It's actually typical of modern Microsoft that they've bought something like Skype long after it has passed its prime. Skype a decade ago worked very well indeed. Modern Skype seems to be getting worse and worse. Still I'm sure the WinRT rewrite will solve all these issues, because one thing modern Microsoft APIs are known for is reducing bloat and making code run well on low end hardware.
The tanks are built, troops have amassed (Score:3, Interesting)
Skype, Surface, Xbox, now a phone, Windows 8, maps, office, voice recognition, skydive, etc etc.
They hold many cards old Microsoft, now that they've starting to tie all these components into a single working organism, along side the sinking share price of Apple. The battlegrounds have been set and this is the first move of Microsoft's new borgification.
What is going to happen is this, we're going to start seeing consolidated product offerings of this calibre which will be focused in reshaping the lounge room, the office, the kids bedroom, the parents bedroom, they've only really left out the kitchen (maybe we'll see Sink OS at some point).
Please tell me amongst the FOSS lovers and Apple punces that dwell on this board that there's someone else out there can see what this minor but well placed move has done? Again, I'm not here to endorse any of this (as people keep thinking i do) I'm just using my own vision and personal experience to draw this conclusion.
MS has made poor moves in the past few years, yet for every poor move one could say it was a strategy to end up at this turning point.
They did this at the perfect time, they've allowed the Skype customer base to become comfortable with their new overlords and now the turn the dark side has become complete!
As for Facebook and it ties with Skype, I'd be very worried about what data gets shared between the two, in fact who in their right mind would of allowed such a partnership to take place ... wait wait ... yes Facebook's run by Mark Z ... I bet he didn't see this coming, so what now? slap a photo gallery app on the side of Skype and you have a better version of Facebook? Hows that 15 or so year "shelf life" on Facebook's platform looking now investors ? :)