AIM will shut down after 20 years

I still had AIM and Yahoo on Pidgin up until maybe two or three years ago.

It amazes me how Facebook messenger became the dominant force with it's totally broken and garbage XMPP implementation (now gone), it's unreliable delivery and the fact that it was a total piece of garbage.

It's now finally up to the standard that AIM/Yahoo/MSN were, twenty years ago. For people who yell about it being proprietary, well so was AIM (Oscar)/Yahoo/MSN/etc. Today there are OSS devs doing the same thing they did back then with project like purple-hangouts and purple-facebook.

We have a lot of different chat services today, but we don't seem to see people developing things like Trillian/Audium/Pidgin the way those were developed back in the day. Today people are fine having multiple chat apps, all with their bloat and terribleness.

SMS had the dubious distinction of being the most expensive way to send data outside of non-commercial satellite and exotic military technologies. I can remember fees of $.35 for 160 7-bit characters worth of data, using bandwidth that was otherwise just going to waste. Carriers got so greedy with SMS.

I'm guessing the other responders might be from other countries. SMS was THE thing when I was younger (early 2000s) way before AIM, ICQ or anything else. Mainly because not everyone had a computer, but everyone had a cell phone.

And then when mobile data became all the rage, everyone I know just installed ICQ on their phone because the data transfer for ICQ was less than the cost of an SMS.

I grew up in Europe and when I got to the US, I was surprised to see most of my classmates either without a phone or just getting one. I got my first cell phone when I was nine? Maybe eight? Most of my classmates got their by the age of twelve. In the US, my classmates got their phones when they were 14 or 16 or even older; however, they had ready access to a computer at all times, I didn't have that back in Europe.

> ICQ got merged into the AIM network after AOL acquired ICQ.

ICQ is still its own separate network.

You could communicate between the two but ICQ will outlive AIM :)

Usability. And if you look at all of the above none of those company really have a product or vision of messaging app.

At one point in time, All AOL, MSN and ICQ really did was try to prevent orders from working on their network. ( AIM / MSN )

And other point ICQ were trying to turn itself into Yahoo, an internet portal.

Google Chat? It couldn't even get the basic right.

MSN started to displace ICQ when it was faster, better and Icons pack ( before Emoji ). And ICQ somehow manage to react to this threat by keep boating itself.

At some point before 2007, MSN won. AIM were still being used in US but the trend was clear, people were slowing moving to MSN in US while the rest of the world has switched away from ICQ to MSN.

Being Microsoft who in my mind has never created any decent product, thought they won and decide not to do much about it. It was the era before iPhone. The era when everyone would question, what is going to bring down Microsoft?

Then came the iPhone that shocked the world. Well least in broad sense of it. The UI were revolutionary. But the tech or dreams wasn't. Pocket PC, Palm, all had similar idea before and HTC were ODM at the time. We had a lite, useless, slow Windows Mobile that couldn't do much at all.

Everyone thought, surely linking MSN Messenger between the Desktop and iPhone / Android would make perfect sense?

Not at Microsoft. And when they finally did? It was too late.

Whatsapp manage to became the dominant platform because it was good and simple. Somehow the tech industry took nearly two decade to figure out.