Microsoft shuts down MSN Messenger in final market of China

Once the world’s favourite instant messaging client, 15-year old MSN Messenger will soon bid a final farewell to the Internet. Post the smartphone age, the Microsoft-developed messaging client was one of the best IM clients known for its reliability and ease of use. The service was rebranded to Windows Live Messenger in 2005 and has since been known by that name.   Microsoft merged MSN Messenger with Skype rendering the former obsolete. Though it had axed MSN messenger from the rest of the world, has been available in China where it’s being run by local partner TOM and not Microsoft itself. Now, even the Chinese service will close down on October 31st and users in China are being encouraged to move to Skype with the offer of free calls.   MSN Messenger is just one of the many IM clients nearing extinction - a service that once attracted a major chunk of PC use, especially among the youth. While messaging clients date back to the 1980’s, it was in the 1990’s when Internet-based graphic IM clients actually began to catch on. That was the age when IM clients such as AOL, MSN, Yahoo, etc introduced the concept of ‘Buddy-lists’ where users could create a set list of people who they could talk to, emoticons for expressing feelings without the need for words, and profile photos. The easy and real-time messaging made it an instant hit, with MSN alone attracting 330 million active users each month.   While MSN is retiring this year, Yahoo messenger is still in operation although there are more bots than humans actually using the service. Others are either being abandoned for modern messaging services by Facebook and Google or have been made obsolete by smartphone messaging apps such as WhatsApp and the likes .