Linked by Howard Fosdick on Thu 8th Nov 2012 02:24 UTC
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?
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Member since:2010-06-08
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
Member since:2005-07-06
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
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2005-07-06
"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.