Sina UC

» see uc.sina.com.cn as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

China's messenger years had a third party in them. Turkey's did not have a contest at all. MSN arrived, MSN took everything, and by the time anyone in my circle had an opinion about alternatives the argument was already settled. Reading about UC is reading about the version of those years where the settled thing nearly came unsettled.

It was built in 2002 by Guizhou Langma Information Technology, a company a long way from Beijing in a province better known for mountains than software. The product was a chat client with the two features QQ was worst at: real-time voice, and file transfer that finished. It aimed itself at students, added alumni directories and themed rooms, and grew about ten thousand concurrent users a week.

Then came the gift. From late 2002 until August 2003 Tencent suspended free QQ registration, and anyone in China who wanted a new chat account had to look elsewhere. By November 2003 UC held 80 million registered accounts, with the peak concurrent figure recorded as 300,000 in the Chinese trade press and 200,000 in the Chinese Wikipedia entry. When QQ opened its doors again the numbers stopped moving, but the position held long enough to matter. At the end of 2005 QQ had 77.8 percent of the Chinese messenger market and MSN had 10.58. UC sat third on 3.23 percent, which in a market that size still meant tens of millions of people.

Sina announced the purchase on 6 July 2004, taking Davidhill Capital and the UC platform with it. Fifteen million dollars in cash and stock landed up front, with up to twenty-one million more due the following year if the growth held up. That purchase is the last interesting thing that happened to the product.

~ the case file ~

~ what sina actually bought ~

Sina was a portal company with news and traffic and no reason for any reader to stay logged in. UC was supposed to be that reason. What it became instead was a feature nobody owned, parked next to a news site while QQ kept shipping: profiles, avatars and dress-up, games, video calls, all of it landing on a client that had stopped moving.

The one part of UC that grew after the sale was the chat rooms, which turned into Sina SHOW, where hosts performed to a room and the room paid for it. That model went on to be worth billions of dollars in China under other names. Sina had it running in a chat client and treated it as a side business.

~ the long silence ~

Updates stopped in 2011. Sina had Weibo by then and Weibo was the whole company's attention, so UC drifted into being internal messaging for Sina staff with a public download page still attached. It stayed like that for six years, which is a strange kind of afterlife: not dead, not maintained, just left running because switching it off required someone to make a decision.

Someone finally did in April 2017, on a day the Chinese sources cannot agree about. The notice cited business adjustment and gave a date to stop.

~ the day it died ~

On 10 May 2017 the desktop client and both phone apps stopped working, and the replacement Sina offered was chat inside Weibo. Chinese coverage read it as an ending for the whole category rather than for one product, listing UC alongside MSN, NetEase Bubble and Fetion as PC-era messengers that had run out of road.

~ what carried over ~

UC is the clearest case of a messenger that was handed a year of open field and could not build anything permanent in it. The registration freeze at Tencent gave it a customer base it had not earned, and once the freeze lifted there was nothing holding those accounts in place except habit that had not had time to form. Fifteen years later the shutdown notice was three sentences long and nobody outside China wrote about it at all.

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