Windows Live Messenger

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

~ the obit ~

windows live messenger was msn messenger with a longer name. microsoft rebranded the client on december 13 2005 as part of the windows live initiative, which was meant to bundle hotmail and the photo gallery and the writer blog tool under one umbrella that could compete with google's free web stack. the messenger product itself did not change much. contact list down the side, custom emoticons in the chat field, signed-in icon turning green when your friends came back from dinner.

at its peak in june 2009 the service was reporting 330 million monthly active users. that number includes the part of the world where there was no real competitor: most of europe and latin america, plus the markets where text messaging was still expensive enough that a desktop chat client carried real weight. nobody in any of those places ever called it "windows live messenger." it was just msn. the rebrand stayed inside microsoft.

microsoft bought skype in may 2011 for 8.5 billion dollars. that was the day windows live messenger had a death date, even though nobody announced it yet. the formal shutdown came on april 8 2013 in most regions. china kept running until october 31 2014 because of a contractual carve-out. the migration installer asked you to sign into your microsoft account and your contact list mostly came across with the right display names.

the rebrand was something i registered the way you register a road sign getting repainted. the green logo got slightly fatter. the install wizard tried to opt me into windows live spaces. i clicked through to the contact window because the contact window was the entire point. i was on this client through ttnet broadband at home and the occasional internet cafe session in ankara through the whole 2005 to 2010 stretch. the name on the title bar mattered less than whether the person i wanted to talk to was online.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the windows live brand was for ~

around 2005 microsoft was watching google ship free web products at a pace that the desktop-software-shipping cadence could not match. windows live was the answer: a brand for the consumer web stack, distinct from the office and windows product lines, that would let microsoft iterate on hotmail and the messenger and the rest without the desktop release schedule. on paper it was the right idea. in practice the brand never landed. people called the products by their original names for the entire eight years live existed.

~ the killing ~

skype was the official replacement and the migration worked, technically. your contacts came across, you could sign in with the same hotmail address, the chat field was still there. the texture of msn was gone though. no nudges. no signed-in icon next to people's names with the personal message attached. skype was a voice call app that happened to have chat bolted on. msn was a chat app that occasionally did voice. the move from one to the other felt like a downgrade even when microsoft was insisting it was a step forward.

~ what survived ~

the windows live brand was retired around 2012 across the whole suite. hotmail became outlook.com, the photo gallery and writer and mail apps went into the windows essentials bin which itself shut down in january 2017. the messenger was the only product in the lineup that had real cultural weight independent of microsoft, and microsoft killed it specifically to use that weight to populate skype. for a generation of users from istanbul to são paulo, this was the client they used to learn how to type fast in three windows at once.

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