Windows Live/MSN Messenger to close

[wells]

Microsoft has announced it intends to "retire" its instant message chat tool and replace it with Skype's messaging tool.

The news comes 18 months after the software giant announced it was paying $8.5bn (£5.3bn) for the communications software developer.

Microsoft said Windows Live Messenger (WLM) would be turned off by March 2013 worldwide, with the exception of China.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20222998

No surprise, it has no real place in the world now and with Microsoft already in charge of Skype there seems to be no reason for Microsoft to keep it going when it's basically a poorer version of that product with less ways of making money from it. Perhaps Microsoft would have been better developing it into something similar to Skype years ago rather than buying it.

I think the launch of Facebook chat probably saw them lose a lot of users as well.

[bilky asko]

I haven't used it in years. It was useful at a time when people were using Bebo and MySpace, and they wanted to have a bit of real-time chat. Facebook took over most of that role, and as soon as everyone realised that the cripplingly slow Live Messenger could be replaced by the resource-light Facebook Messenger, everyone abandoned it.

Skype has the video and audio element well and truly covered, and isn't something that can be well implemented in a web browser just yet.

I think Microsoft acquired Skype at the right time, and have the product base to make a success of it. I reckon they might start introducing features exclusive to Windows tablets, or at least make the experience much more integrated. It would make good business sense.

[Pete]

I still use MSN daily, although admittedly I now only have three contacts as opposed to the hayday of 80+ back in 2004.

Not so sure about moving over to Skype which has a far inferior text IM system

[eoin]

Not so sure about moving over to Skype which has a far inferior text IM system

This always frustrated me when Skype became more popular and everyone stopped using MSN. But apparently the problem of receiving people's messages days after they've sent them should now be solved.

From The Verge:

"We've been relatively quiet since the acquisition," says Skype's Derek Snyder in a meeting with The Verge about Skype's latest changes. "We have been silently re-architecting basically the entire way Skype works." This change means Skype is moving away from its historic P2P service into a modern one ready for the mobile-based world. Skype is shifting to Microsoft's Messenger platform initially, designed with mobile considerations in mind.

"For the last six months or so we have been moving people to the Messenger backend," says Snyder. "The big advantage there is that Skype doesn't always have to be running. It wakes up when it's time to deliver a chat message or call etc." The changes also mean that around 80 percent of all IMs sent on Skype are sent over the new Messenger backend. Skype's Windows 8 app is the first to take advantage of this new model, with updates coming to iOS and Android later to complete feature parity.