indoona

» see indoona.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Every internet provider in Europe went through a phase of believing it could also be the software. Tiscali's version of that phase was called indoona, and it lasted six years. The company had been selling voice over the internet to Italians since the early 2000s under a name, wiPhone, that has aged much worse than the product. In September 2011 it retired that and shipped indoona instead, an app for calling and messaging other indoona users for free, anywhere, from a phone or a desktop.

The pitch in Italy was concrete rather than visionary. Free calls and video between users, cheap per-minute rates out to landlines and mobiles that undercut what the carriers charged for calling abroad, and for a promotional stretch at the end of 2011, a couple of hundred free monthly minutes to Italian landlines. It shipped on Windows and Mac as well as Android and iOS, which mattered in 2011 in a way it stopped mattering by 2014.

In 2014 Tiscali opened an API and started talking about connected objects, letting indoona contacts include devices rather than only people. It is a genuinely interesting idea and it was also the sound of a product looking for a second reason to exist. By then WhatsApp had taken Italy the way it took most of Europe, arriving preinstalled or installed on day one, with no account to create and no brand loyalty to ask for.

~ the record ~

~ why a provider builds a messenger ~

The logic is always the same and it is always wrong. Your subscribers are already paying you every month. If the app they chat in is also yours, the relationship gets stickier and the churn number improves. What the logic misses is that a messenger is only worth anything if the people you want to talk to are on it, and an ISP's customer list is not that. It is a billing list.

Tiscali still had a substantial Italian subscriber book in 2011, which looks like a launch base and is not one. Nobody in Rome downloads a chat app because their line rental provider made it.

~ the shutdown, in two steps ~

On 24 May 2017 indoona came off the app stores and credit purchases stopped, so the product was dead in commercial terms three months before it was dead in technical terms. The service itself ran until Thursday 31 August 2017 and then stopped answering. The farewell note from the team called the whole thing an engaging and emotional adventure, and gave no reason at all for ending it, which is a fair reflection of how these decisions get made and how they get announced.

~ from where I was sitting ~

Italy got indoona and Turkey got nothing like it, which turned out not to be a loss. My messenger history in that window runs through MSN and then Skype and then, like everybody else, WhatsApp, and no Turkish provider ever seriously asked me to chat inside its own app. The one difference worth naming is that a national messenger has a ceiling built into the word national. indoona was competing against a product whose entire advantage was that it did not care which country you were in.

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