Where(or when?) was AIM a big thing? I only knew like 4 people personally who used it. Most people used IRC, MSN, and ICQ, back in the days.
Depends on the culture. For instance, it wasn't used at all in the ex-USSR back in the day.
The Last Message Sent on AIM
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Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM
#72It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were worth billions. It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management…
> It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were worth billions.
> It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management textbooks, but who knows.
It's not short sightedness. It was perfectly reasonnable to close these plateforms (in so much as they were closed - Microsoft folded MSN into the Lync and Skype brands and rather successfully sold it to pro users). They were never going to make money with them as they were. You are just missing that modern instant messassing plateforms have little in common with AIM and MSN.
If you look at what is valuable today, you have on one side WeChat and Whatsapp who took over the mobile space and are extremely valuable in emerging countries where text messaging became the main point of entry for conducting business and mobile payments. On the other side, you have Slack which use is centered around chat rooms and collaboration rather than direct messaging and whose popularity grew mainly on the shifting habits of a generation used to communicate via text, habits taken on smartphones. Then again, Microsoft was quick to reuse the infrastructure they already had to launch Teams which is very successful.
So, unless you could foresee the emergence of a mobile first world, it completely made sense to pivot these services towards paying customers.
Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM
#73It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were worth billions. It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management…
I think it's as you said, corporations didn't recognize the economic value of chat platforms back then. I think they were mostly focused on "Web 2.0" stuff so they probably tried putting all of their resources into that. You often see companies axe perfectly good business units just because they have a slightly lower margin or contribution to overall revenue, as they think putting the people from those units into the…
I see Google also axing small winners in order to have people working on big bets. Undermining and then axing Orkut and then trying to create Google+ never made sense to me. A lot of non-brazilians non-indians (that didn’t use or even knew Orkut) defended the decision at the time, but I think history showed it was a bad bet.
Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We can see Google doing this over and over: They actually create a lot of nice products that could be profitable on their own, but since the main Google products are just making much more money per employee it still makes sense for them to axe the small "winning products" and have almost everyone work on the big winners. Even 10 years ago they've been very explicit about this strategy internally. Management talks a…
You may not be the target audience though, the target audience are probably people that aren't yet "bough into" the google ecosystem. So they are unaware of this axing policy. Anyone logging into chromium, using gmail and google calendar and an android device is already "theirs". What they want is to increase the share of people that are in the MS ecosystem (and presumably also OSX ecosystem, but that's mostly a stat…
You will be surprised how many people are indeed aware of Google’s axing policy, if not even consciously.
The reality is that so many of them have been burnt by Google. Picasa was an extremely popular photo management platform used by many. Google Play Music was extremely popular. Google Plus was not exactly popular but touched nearly every Google user, was highly promoted, and then disappeared. And then you come to the massive list of chat and calling apps that Google has arbitrarily spun up, promoted, and then killed.
But even if we go with the idea that regular people are unaware of Google’s tendency, even subconsciously, there’s also the fact that the way most products become popular is through a smaller subset of influencers. And tech influencers, almost necessarily, are almost certainly aware of googles tendencies.
Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM
#75It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were worth billions. It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management…
I’m still pissed that MSN Messenger died but the hot garbage of Skype continued. I wish the pick for in org chat was MSN and not Skype. Back in 2004 we had chat history, now MS had to come up with the behemoth of Teams to provide that feature. All we needed was msn on Android and iPhone with cloud backup of chats, that’s if.
Lync was MSN and was fairly popular and Skype for business was an evolution of the Lync client not the Skype client. So Microsoft did actually pick MSN. They just kept the stronger brand. Also it always had chat history.
Teams is a different beast and a natural evolution. It's mostly centered around meetings and group chat which makes sense because that's what pro users actually want.
Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM
#76Where(or when?) was AIM a big thing? I only knew like 4 people personally who used it. Most people used IRC, MSN, and ICQ, back in the days.
Growing up in NYC, AIM was how I communicated with all my friends. It was very popular at the turn of the century (of the 21st century).
Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM
#77It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were worth billions. It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management…
> It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were worth billions. > It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new managem…
It would not have been very difficult to pivot AIM into making money. First you add social media style profiles, then ads, then integrations, then feeds... none of this would have relied on mobile. Facebook didn't rely on mobile for many years after formation - the iPhone came out a couple of years after facebook did, and it took a few more years before smartphones saturated the market.
Of course, it's easy to say this today having seen the result. But aol in particular was familiar with ad-driven business; they should have had the appropriate resources to anticipate the potential of their businesses.
Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Then, I need to find a second to let them know of this (unless I either totally drop the ball or consciously decide to not reply). This seems strange to me. I view IM as asynchronous. If someone messages me while I'm busy, I'll just reply later. And I don't expect people to answer immediatly. No need to sync to chat together (of course if we're both available we can chat in sync).
Honestly that's my point (and perhaps I should have been more clear about it). I think in hindsight I vastly prefer synchronous chat- which is why I pointed out in the beginning that AIM was the closest online communication to in-person communication. With asynchronous communication you do need to be much more proactive in how you handle your 'threads'. As I mentioned before, you need to remember or decide to reply _…
The “asynchronous” chat apps are designed to basically be synchronous. And aggressively so.
That’s why you have that aggressive red notification badge with the number of unread messages that your brain requires you to get rid of. That’s why when someone sends you a message, the default is to aggressively slide a notification with the message no matter what you’re doing.
Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM
#79It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were worth billions. It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new management…
> It was such a senseless destruction. People miss AIM, people miss MSN Messenger and just a couple years later it turned out instant messaging platforms were worth billions. > It's still insane to me these corporations shut down perfectly viable platforms that were still used by millions. The short sightedness and pettiness of these directors is something of legend, I hope there's a chapter about this in new managem…
> You are just missing that modern instant messassing plateforms have little in common with AIM and MSN.
I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. AIM could have created a great mobile app with new features a la whatsapp et al, a new OSCAR protocol that was backwards compatible, and had a huge base of mobile users.
Hindsight is 20/20, but it sounds like you're saying that even with hindsight closing AIM was the right call.
Re: The Last Message Sent on AIM
#80Where(or when?) was AIM a big thing? I only knew like 4 people personally who used it. Most people used IRC, MSN, and ICQ, back in the days.
AIM was all my IRL friends, I met a few people from IRC over my 15+ years on it but ICQ and IRC were "internet friends" to me. AIM was huge when I was in middle/hs in the late 90/2000s.