Death of MSN and the Growth of Other Instant Messaging Platforms
A few of you might remember MSN, a popular instant messaging platform by Microsoft launched in 1999. It was not quite popular in the US as it was in a lot of other countries. I remember MSN being a big part of my middle school career; I would come home and get on MSN immediately to check if anyone left me any messages when I was offline. MSN is where I socialized: I talked to my friends, connected to my oversea family members, asked for homework help, etc. If I was on my computer, I was on MSN. The IM service was pretty like Facebook’s messenger: you can see which friends were online and chat them regardless if they were on or offline. One MSN feature that I enjoyed immensely as a middle schooler was the vast color and font choices that I had. It gave users a more personalized and customized feel.
Microsoft shut down MSN in most countries in the beginning of 2013 but kept it in China until October of 2014. There are multiple reasons for end of MSN. First, the introduction of other instant messaging platforms such as the Facebook messenger. The messenger that Facebook was not necessarily better than MSN but it was easier for the users. As Facebook gained popularity, more people used it and there was no need to log in into two social media platforms to connect with friends. If people wanted to use Facebook and MSN, they would have to log in to both but why do that when you can just use Facebook’s messenger and log in just once? You can chat with your friends at the same time you look at others’ newsfeed and updates. On the other hand, texting and messaging on mobile phones became more popular. It used to be very expensive to send texts (at least where I was from) so MSN was a good alternative for messaging since it was free. However, it became less and less costly for people to text and more apps appeared in the market for messaging such as Whatsapp. MSN also did not update and develop new features when competitors appeared and when it tried to update, it was already too late: its competitors were way ahead. Due to these reasons, less and less people used MSN. Social network platforms are only successful when people’s friends use it also. Slowly, people started adopting new platforms and abandoning MSN.
This behavior can be related to the diffusion of new behavior through social media that we learned in class. As new instant messaging platform with better features appeared, people started using these new platforms and slowly abandoning MSN until very few people to no one use it anymore.
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/14491/20140830/microsoft-announces-death-of-msn-messenger.htm
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-MSN-Messenger-die