Microsoft is discontinuing Windows Live Messenger in 1st quarter 2013, forcing users to switch to Skype. Most would want to switch to Skype anyway with its more advanced capabilities, and the switch makes sense to Microsoft, since they purchased Skype for $8.5 billion last year. However, the move may be seen as typical Redmondian high-handedness by those using Messenger with dial-up. Technically Skype works with dial-up but in practice most agree you really need broadband for decent use. Will everyone view Messenger as replaceable by Skype?
They should start supporting XMPP. Otherwise this mess will be only more messy.
Well, unless there’s just one “winner” network in all of this, then it will be certainly less messy… and Skype might be the closest to such status ;p
But seriously, the mess mostly got smaller over the last decade, IMHO – most of the smallish IM networks died out.
Edited 2012-11-08 04:01 UTC
There is no “winner” in this. There are and will be many participants. Saying there will be a “winner” is like saying there will be one e-mail provider eventually. That won’t going to happen.
IM networks either will cooperate (read XMPP), or their users will be separated by non interoperability, like e-mail was in the prehistoric computing era. Even AOL started adding [some limited] federated XMPP support to their network. MS actually started some shifts in that direction with Windows Messenger. But they didn’t go far enough.
Edited 2012-11-08 04:59 UTC
“Winner” was already in my post between quotation marks for a reason.
But there’s another scenario: a mild balkanisation of sorts (also related to http://www.osnews.com/story/26522/On_Google_a_political_mystery_tha… story), what’s already the case – ICQ lives on in CIS, ~western mobile has its WhatsApp, ~eastern mobile has LINE, my place has an IM network essentially limited to this one country. People don’t care that much for communicating with non-buddies; conversely, they care where their buddies are, not much about tech aspects.
Then there’s… Skype, tying it all together a bit (in the sense that, from what I see, it’s “oh, you don’t use that IM network? Then let’s skype!”); and people seem mostly content with the way things are, they certainly don’t care much that Skype for example is closed (oh yeah, and a non-federated ~XMPP network is what took off in western mobile world)
Email emerged, matured in a different era, with vastly different demographic.
Well I know enough people who don’t use Skype. Some of them use non interoperable networks and aren’t happy that they need to register so many accounts just to connect to their friends from other networks. XMPP with federation could easily solve that, but selfish interests of walled gardens prevent this from happening.
Whatsapp is a horrible monstrosity – it uses XMPP underneath, but modifies it to make it non standard and non interoperable with normal clients (I’m not even talking about federation). Not only that, it uses completely broken security approach, based on device ids, without letting one choosing arbitrary user ids (JIDs) and passwords. It’s a horror from which one needs to stay as far away as possible.
As some one expressed it strongly on Slashdot:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3146455&cid=41469215
Edited 2012-11-08 07:18 UTC
But see that’s exactly the point: even despite WhatsApp being such monstrosity, it still took off by storm – and, the way things look, it’s quite possible it might become the dominant player in its field.
The factors you or I care about often hardly matter in social, really, dynamics of IM networks.
BTW, UID based on phone numbers was one of its major strenghts (WRT why & how it became so popular)
Edited 2012-11-08 07:32 UTC
Well, I’m not blaming users who trade security and interoperability for perceived (rather questionable) convenience – that’s just futile. I’m blaming developers who proliferate this kind of stuff.
Edited 2012-11-08 07:42 UTC
Ahh, but there will probably always be devs who “exploit” priorities of typical users, in their quest to be more ~successful – not much point in blaming them, too.
Edited 2012-11-09 23:34 UTC
Ideally that would be great… but this is Microsoft.
They already support XMPP (with some OAUTH based authentication), GNOME 3 Empathy support connecting to Messenger network using XMPP. What they don’t support yet is federation (interconnection between XMPP providers networks), unlike Google Talk
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/live/hh826554.aspx
I hope this gateway remains and I think it should because this capitulation on MS to use the XMPP standard was to allow easier integration with businesses that wanted to provide services over Messenger
VoIP app that works excellent on marginal connections, much better than Skype in my experience*, is the original win32 Google Talk client – with the additional bonus of being quite easy to grasp by non-techies (so it’s plausible to quickly guide distant somebody through installation, using ordinary phonecall, and then switch to ~free VoIP; it worked the few times I tried).
Too bad that client is also a bit neglected lately… oh well, at least most of the nice things (and more, like video) found its way to Gmail plugin.
*and not only my experience: GTalk was battle-tested by my buddy, communicating from over-utilised student LAN on his end, with a dial-up deep in CIS. Skype in the same conditions was non-functional; GTalk – quite nice, definitely comparable to a good quality phonecall.
Dropping live messenger will have no impact on me.
I use skype because it’s one of the few cross platform video chat solutions around. Unfortunately it’s buggy and unintuitive. Contacts who are online don’t always show up as being online. I’ve had trouble with the windows version dropping video and needing to restart calls to get video back. I’d love to have a better cross-platform solution.
There’s some praise for oovoo, but they’ve been ignoring linux for five years despite continued requests. I personally cannot back a solution that isn’t truly cross platform: windows, linux, android, mac.
Can anyone recommend a good cross platform video conf solution?
Gmail video plugin (which is really now G+ Hangouts, just launched from Gmail)
No, hangouts aren’t using conventional XMPP/Jingle, since they perform custom server side multiplexing. XMPP/Jingle is moving in direction of standardizing client side multiplexing (with Muji). Obviously client side multiplexing is more demanding on the channel bandwidth, on the other hand it doesn’t enforce heavy requirements on the XMPP server.
I wasn’t really saying anything about tech details (see, that’s the part which doesn’t matter too much WRT adoption :p ), it’s just that even Gmail whined a bit about its video feature being somehow integrated with Hangouts. Anyway, I mentioned it mostly because Hangouts roll out is, IIRC, when Gmail video came also to Android, which Alfman desired.
I’m more interested in standard and interoperable solutions. Hangaouts will be Google only as far as I understand (while Google talk uses standard XMPP/Jingle and is interoperable with users from other servers). Hopefully Muji will get traction soon enough and will catch up in support in popular XMPP clients.
Well, generally I see it as a compromise – apart from the ~noble goals, keep in mind which solutions have a realistic chance of gaining momentum. Otherwise, if you strive for purity too much, the public might steer to really nasty solutions.
Luckily, Gmail/Gtalk is decently standard-compliant (it pushed some after all) and interoperable …while being quite possibly the most popular XMPP client, if I’d have to guess.
Muji is still work in progress, but it’s getting there.
I’m personally more interested in an Average Joe – oriented cross-platform WLM alternative. I mean, the software would have to do all the usual stuff like e.g. voice and video chat, text chat with colours and embedded pictures, graphical smileys, the ability to send and receive files, offline messages, and maintaining of friends lists.
It being a replacement for WLM and needing to be Average Joe – oriented places several restrictions on it, however: chat rooms are not a replacement for friends lists and therefore friends lists are a hard requirement, there must be no need to choose a server or set up and configure server – related settings, and it must be a separate application, not just something that runs inside the browser.
I’m not aware of anything that’d fulfill those requirements except a few closed-source, non-cross-platform clients.
I looked into Jitsi a while back (during/after the last major Skype outage). I didn’t go with it in the end as I got a bit frustrated trying to set it up and Skype got working again.
https://jitsi.org/
But it’s cross-platform, at least for PC OSes. As for mobile they don’t have a client, but then it uses open protocols so there’s probably an Android client that would interoperate.
And I should probably look into again due its OSS nature and secure encryption, considering how much I communicate with China (Skype for China has filtering and a backdoor for the Party to intrude)
Yeah, but unfortunately it doesn’t fulfill the requirements I stated.
I think XMPP should handle all those tasks which you listed. What exactly do you think doesn’t work?
For example the “no need to configure servers” – part. Average Jane or Joe does NOT want to do such and that is actually a big reason for why I have been unable to convert the people I know of to some free alternative. At most they accept having to put in a password and username, nothing else.
XMPP doesn’t really seem like the the target here – it’s like asking for a webmail or online maps, and getting “HTPP” in response.
Now, some XMPP clients are closer to the requirements, some further …but, usually something is missing, or not working quite the way it should.
It’s built on Java dude!
I didn’t realise until I installed it and all my processor fans ran full speed. Looking at the process list found java at 100%. Killed it and uninstall. Phew, that was close…
Too bad for the last requirement. Because a combination (so yeah, still not that great, not one app; though I’m not sure how extensive the Android client is) of Gmail with video plugin plus the original win32 GTalk, does pretty much all that (Gtalk for image transfers with nice previews, and file transfers in general if too big for email); maybe except not having several buddy lists, if that’s what you want there.
Too bad it might not last, the win32 client is how neglected.
So, other than that… Skype, I suppose ;p
Most people use Messenger for chatting (via the keyboard), Skype does this too. So it shouldn’t make a difference for dial-up users.
So does this mean that from whenever this happens on, third-party IM clients like Pidgin will no longer work? As well as the current Xbox 360 as it is now (unless there is an update), etc.?
That’s just nice… right after I had planned to ditch the Yahoo! Messenger service once and for all (I never use it anyway, but I was intending to switch everything over to MSN Messenger/Google Talk).
Well, if that’s the case, looks like my plan got thrown out the window. Thanks Microsoft… just when I decide to get serious about giving one of your services a shot!
Anyway… instant messaging is still important to me. It can be more “private” than a real talk over the phone or VoIP (when other people are around), and it is universally supported among all forms of computers as long as a physical keyboard or some other sort of text input (on-screen keyboard, etc.) is available, and even usable as an alternative to the ridiculously overpriced text messaging services provided on cell phones. Not to mention, the logging capabilities of many instant messaging clients is a pretty cool feature. Not all computers (I’m talking desktops–I’ve never bought/owned a laptop) come with fancy built-in crap like microphones and webcams, or even any at all.
That said… when I’m at home on my computer, I save my cell phone minutes by just using Google Voice. Broke out an old stock mic that came with an old Gateway/Gateway 2000 computer back in the late 90s. I have a Skype account, but I never really used it and I don’t know if I ever will. Google Voice’s pricing this year (or lack of it) and endless features extending far beyond just VoIP won me over.
Not really, since Google Talk won’t be in the least affected by this. I’d ditched MSN/WLM messenger a while back anyway, since the service is full of spam bots much like what AIM has become. Facebook and Google Talk are where most people are going these days when it comes to text chatting. Skype is still really popular for VOIP though.
Problem with Facebook’s XMPP server is the lack of federation. You can’t communicate with users of other XMPP servers if you use Facebook’s one. However Google Talk XMPP server is federated. You can communicate with users of any other federated XMPP server (like jabber.org or what not) if you use Google’s server.
Edited 2012-11-08 06:39 UTC
IIRC, Facebook isn’t even strictly an XMPP server, how it internally – it “just” exposes XMPP as one of its interfaces to the outside world.
Probably makes federation even more unlikely…
At least Jabber transports to it are straightforward.
I really do want to make Google Talk my main instant messaging service. Unfortunately, I can’t do that just yet because in my experience… no one that matters (to me) is moving to it. Your experience, the stats you’re going by, or whatever it is that you made that claim from–it just doesn’t reflect on what I’m seeing. Gmail, yeah, almost everyone I know probably has a Gmail/Google account… but I’d be surprised if many of them even know about Google Talk yet or have tried it.
Only one of my friends has actually on occasion used Google’s service to get in contact with me, but he seems to prefer Yahoo! messenger. Another refuses to leave Yahoo! completely (no idea why–he uses both their e-mail and messenger services) and claims that he hates Google for some reason. My mom has a Google account and knows how and has used it, and she’s the only who used it exclusively (but hasn’t for a while).
So I need a backup, and because my friends are pretty much all gamers and probably already chat with the MSN protocol on the Xbox 360 anyway, I figured the MSN messenger service would be the perfect choice. Add to that the ability to talk to people who are using Yahoo Messenger without even having a Yahoo account, and the plan seemed infallible. Then add Outlook.com to the mix (which I was really impressed by), and I was sold on Microsoft’s service being used as my “transitioning” or secondary instant messaging service. That is… until Microsoft decided to do something like this.
My plan was something like this: Phase out Yahoo! messenger, preferably having people contact me at one of my Microsoft account addresses. Talk to Yahoo users who are too stubborn to change directly through MSN messenger, while they continue to use the Yahoo! service. In the longer term, prefer that people contact me with Google Talk, but still allow the option of contacting me through MSN; by this time, my Yahoo! account would have been long since ditched. I thought it through… and it seemed just about perfect. :/
Again… thanks a lot, Microsoft. It seems like for every little good thing they do, they take multiple, bigger steps back. By the way… I set my instant messaging client to only allow messages from people on my list, so the whole spam bot thing is no problem to me, and hasn’t been for years–since I last used the official Yahoo! client itself, way back in the early- to mid-2000s. As for Facebook… well, I won’t even go there. I’ll just say that I despise that wretched corporation, and I will never create an account on their site.
I still hope that Jitsi (client) and Prosodi take off.
https://jitsi.org/
http://prosody.im/
It’s not the question of one client, but rather the question of further XMPP development. When Jingle/Muji will mature, clients will catch up. So far it’s somewhat dragging behind. Also various libraries like Telepathy and Farstream for example still need polishing.
Edited 2012-11-08 08:19 UTC
Keep knifing them babies, Microsoft!
At some point with all this brand switcheroo and project cannibalism, Microsoft will be left with a confusing and disharmonious collection of platforms and strategies — oh, too late.
So true… Microsoft’s product line started looking like a joke quite a while back, and it seems to be getting worse almost every third or fifth time they make the news. I was already disgusted enough with their “Live” crap, and then what they did with the Xbox brand (now it’s some generic multimedia crap for almost every OS they put out these days, and it’s no longer all about the games). They had a glimmer of hope in the form of Outlook.com, or so I thought… and now, they shatter it with this news.
Probably no image nails Microsoft’s latest brand and product lines and this subject in general as much as this album cover…
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4vgi1mcf41qespvko1_400.jpg
Edited 2012-11-08 11:53 UTC
Not really.
Skype is widely used, especially with business. MSN messenger is a ad ridden pile of crap, these days.
Things might have changed in over half a decade since I last used it, but I recall Yahoo! Messenger being incredibly bad as well. It was bloated as hell too. That’s easily fixed by just using some other client like Pidgin. In fact, Microsoft could’ve even tossed their official client in the trash and made a new one from scratch… but instead, they decide to give the whole damn service the axe. The servers are being taken down completely for every part of the world except for parts of China.
It’s pretty bad when a company chooses to support a foreign country instead of its own… but it seems like that’s all the U.S. does these days, and the government seems to think it’s just fine that jobs are moving across the oceans away from its own citizens. And now, there goes the original MSN Messenger service… to China.
I tend to go with what ever accounts I already have.
Google and Facebook will probably benefit as much as Skype from this closure.
I mean, it feels as if skype’s performances have just gotten worse within the last 2-3 years.
I’m a role-player but, with time, many of the people I play with have moved far away. We manage to somewhat gather once or twice a year, but there are always at least one or two who just can’t be there.
Back in 2009, we decided to try to use skype to have a game together anyway. The main group was here in Europe, while one player was in Japan and the other in Australia (don’t ask about the time difference, first time I had to wake up at 6AM to play a game…)
We didn’t have a premium account, so we used a laptop for each of them – basically, we saw them and they saw us (except for the other guy playing through skype).
It worked incredibly fine. It really felt like they were here in the room with us. The only thing we had to keep in mind was for the DM not to let everyone speak at once, for that is just too much through skype.
One last thing: it worked nicely on windows, mac and linux (we’re a pretty varied bunch).
Fast-forward to 2012: for the last year-year and a half, things have steadily gotten worse. We have the same games, but we keep losing connexions, more often than not, the only guy using it (the one in Japan came back) just can’t use video, as it just gets bad even faster, the sound goes weird for no apparent reason.
Again, that’s on any and all systems.
So I wonder exactly how ownership by microsoft is going to change that in the future. I must say, I’m not keeping my hopes up…
Welcome to the world of Microsoft. Okay, I’m partially sniping here, but only partially. Look at Microsoft Office, which has gotten larger and slower over the years without adding any additional value to the most commonly used parts of it (Word, Excel, Outlook, and later Sharepoint). Look at the Windows Live suite itself. Bigger, slower, buggier and even worse, ad-infested. Until recently even Windows followed this pattern, with Windows 7 being the first Windows release in several years that wasn’t slower than the version immediately preceding it (Windows 8 seems to set the trend again however, thanks to the slowness of the Metro/Desktop combination).
In short: Could Skype’s performance be improved? Certainly. With Microsoft in charge, is that likely? Probably not. I’m just glad they haven’t too badly messed up the Mac version yet, although how long that’s going to last is anyone’s guess.
As for office, lets not forget the ton of work that was put into supporting things like infopath, connecting to sharepoint, connecting to databases etc etc that happened over the years.
While for users of a lone desktop things might not seem very different, I bet there are a ton of changes for Enterprise users.
Anyway the same comments could be made for pretty much any program, the Linux kernel, the GCC compiler, Open Office and more besides, MacOSX etc. etc. etc.
Also why does anyone care anymore? We have loads of ram and hardrive room and ridiculously powerful processors (even in our phones).
The only thing that I have seen significantly slow down a computer in the last few years in is ironically Firefox (memory leak is still there) and McAfee.
Windows 8 is easily faster than Windows 7. Especially while using the desktop.
Metro apps are slow to start-up but once running are nice and snappy.
The linux version actually got a decent update after Microsoft bought them.
I really hate most of this crap that spoken of about Microsoft.
Edited 2012-11-08 12:24 UTC
Well, it actually began to worsen before skype was bought by microsoft. So, although I’ve no love for redmond’s giant (and that’s saying it nicely), I don’t think they can be held accountable for that one.
And Skype 4.0 is literally the only application on my system which uses the ALSA API yet breaks unless you’re running PulseAudio.
I had to stay on Skype 2.2 beta (thank goodness for the statically-linked tarball) to have a desktop where I can run Skype without being condemned to PulseAudio randomly bugging out.
(I also have one other thing that requires PulseAudio. A game which, on startup, waits forever for PulseAudio to start even if you don’t have it installed. Thankfully, I got it in a bundle and was only trying to run it out of curiosity.)
Well that is the problem, which API do you use?
Last time I counted there was:
*ALSA
*OSS
*PulseAudio
Which one do you make it compatible with? Most distros have pulseaudio.
Edited 2012-11-09 08:21 UTC
And yet, somehow, everyone else who uses the ALSA API manages to writes code that works fine when the ALSA client libraries talk directly to the ALSA drivers rather than having PulseAudio sitting between them.
Skype 4 is literally the only application I’ve ever found which uses the ALSA API but breaks on Ubuntu-based distros if you `apt-get autoremove pulseaudio` like they recommend for disabling PulseAudio.
Almost every major binary based distro uses PulseAudio now. Blame the problems on the fact that there is massive fragmentation because of the number of Linux distros.
Then don’t remove pulse audio.
Edited 2012-11-09 13:04 UTC
If it actually worked, I wouldn’t.
I don’t know about you, but I really don’t feel like babysitting my computer because, every time they claim to have fixed the “PulseAudio randomly starts consuming 100% of a CPU core” bug, nothing changes.
Also, it does nothing I need aside from locking my soundcard to only applications running in the current X session… and golly gosh isn’t that a desired feature when it makes Timidity++ (I often play old Windows games in Wine) and system text-to-speech engines a pain to setup.
Every PulseAudio feature I actually care about is also done by ALSA dmix and dmix Just Worksâ„¢ while being significantly lighter. (I have an old 2Ghz Celeron I keep around for minimum requirements testing on my own creations)
I think I’ll probably just ditch Skype instead, bite the bullet, and spend a day or two figuring out how to get an open-source XMPP+Jingle VoIP client to interoperate with Google Talk. After all, all my friends are on that too.
Edited 2012-11-09 13:57 UTC
BTW as for “bloat” in Office …
http://i.imgur.com/QwOHb.png
11mb of ram being used.
Isn’t that column a bit unreliable WRT showing total memory usage? (IIRC there are better ones at it – page it VM size?)
I mean… NT kernel, less than 1 MiB? Current ( I assume) version of Winamp ~6 MiB?
Edited 2012-11-10 00:28 UTC
I honestly don’t know (but probably should), but it just illustrates that the comments about bloat are bullshit.
Well, I would mostly side with the “BS” thing …but still, it would mean you can’t really use this particular task manager column to demonstrate that.
Windows Live Messenger a.k.a. MSN, never worked quite well on Linux, through their several clones: aMSN, Pidgin, you name it.
Skype has a version for Linux that is far more usable than any Messenger clone.
I think this was good.
Basic text chat seemed to work well enough with aMSN, just other issues such as webcam, when MS changed the webcam protocols for Live Messenger. And the ugly fonts when aMSN was using Tk/Tcl 8.4
Never had any bad thing to say about the “emesene” client when I was using it, and it also had a nice GUI to back it up. I really wonder why so few Linux users knew about it…
http://blog.emesene.org/
Then again, I guess that’s all history now. But I wouldn’t consider Linux Skype as a wonder of integration, with its 32-bit builds and the random UVC issue that require patching the launcher script to make webcams work.
Edited 2012-11-08 18:55 UTC
Is “Messenger replaceable by Skype”?
Absolutely yes. I have been moving everyone, friends, family, and strangers away from MSN to Skype since 2005 telling them how much better it was (even in 2005 Skype was that good).
Now, I am just waiting for a good Skype replacement so I can begin moving those very same people off Skype and on to it. So when Microsoft finally makes Skype .NET and Windows only, I am prepared.
I thought MSN messenger died back in 2004. Have not seen anyone use it since those ads was introduced. I might be wrong, but i guess this will not bother most people if my scenario is close to true, as noone seems to be using it anyways.