Windows Live Call

» see live.us.telefonica.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Windows Live Call shipped inside Windows Live Messenger 8.0 on 19 June 2006, the release where Microsoft stopped saying MSN Messenger in public. It was not a separate program. It was a window that opened out of the contact list when you clicked the phone icon, and it did two unrelated jobs that Microsoft insisted on selling as one product. Computer Call and Video Call were free and ran PC to PC. Phone Call dialed real telephone numbers and charged for the minutes.

The paid half is the reason the thing existed. Microsoft had no interest in running a telephone company, so it sold the minutes through carriers: Verizon held the United States, and a rotating cast of national operators held everywhere else. The Messenger client took the call and handed it to whoever had signed the contract in your country. Where nobody had signed one, the Phone Call tab was still sitting in your window, pointing at a signup page you could not finish.

Verizon quit first, dropping its Web Calling service for Messenger on 1 September 2008, and Microsoft moved the American business to Telefonica. The landing page at live.us.telefonica.com is the only official website the product has left, and it exists today as a Wayback link in the infobox of its own Wikipedia article. Twenty-one months after the handover, Messenger Wave 4 shipped with no VoIP in it, and Windows Live Call was discontinued on 1 June 2010. The free audio and video chat survived the cut, because the free part had never been the business.

Messenger was the whole social internet in Turkey for most of a decade, and that phone icon sat at the top of every conversation window anyone here ever opened. You clicked it once. What came back was a rate card for a service no Turkish operator had agreed to carry, which is a particular kind of dead end: the software is installed and working, and the missing piece is a signature in a building on another continent.

~ the record ~

~ the hardware nobody remembers ~

There was a telephone. The Windows Live Messenger Phone was a two-line cordless handset built by Uniden and Philips, with one line going into the wall jack like any home phone and the other into a USB port. The base charged beside the computer and the handset walked around the room. Its color screen showed your Messenger contact list with display names and current status text, so you picked a person instead of a number and let the handset work out whether the call went over the internet or over the copper. It needed no drivers, only a current Messenger install, which in 2006 was a safe assumption about any Windows machine. Almost nobody bought one.

~ who sold the minutes ~

The carrier arrangement is what dates the product. Microsoft announced consumer PC-to-phone calling with MCI in 2005, and by the time MCI had been absorbed into Verizon the deal had become the American leg of Windows Live Call. Verizon walked on 1 September 2008, which left Microsoft hunting for a replacement in its biggest market two years into the product's life.

Telefonica took the contract. A Spanish operator running the United States calling service for an American software company is the sort of arrangement a product gets when it is not important enough to defend and not embarrassing enough to kill.

~ what replaced it ~

Skype, eventually. Microsoft bought Skype in May 2011, eleven months after Windows Live Call was switched off, and Skype's entire paid business was the thing Windows Live Call had been attempting through middlemen: credit sitting on an account, charged out at a published rate per country. Microsoft stopped renting that business and bought it.

Messenger Wave 4 is the version most people remember as the beginning of the end. The nudges went and the Facebook feed arrived. Nobody noticed that one of the other subtractions was a telephone service most of the world had never been allowed to buy.

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