WHY MSN MESSENGER FAILED

As a Third-year student in business school, I’ve learned the importance of the few first years in starting your business. And if you were alive in the mid-90s or early 2000s you would remember MSN and the major role it played in our teenage years, How it changed the way you would talk to your friends and how you would meet new friends from all over the world, But in October 31st, 2014 the service shut down completely in all of the worlds except for China which stopped the service on 31 October of the same year which was devastating news to the ones who used to use this service and have various memories attached to it.

MSN as most of you know was launched by Microsoft on August 24, 1995, And it instantly became the biggest messenger software in the 2000s and late 90s, It began as a simple text chat app then later added features like photo delivery, video calls, and games as the technology developed. MSN was a pioneer in its field from changing your status to moody song lyrics to Winks, it was addictive, And the only way any of us would get up from the computer at the time was if our mom killed the dial-up connection.

So to know why it failed we have to look at the history that led to its failure.

The reasons for the fall

MSN messenger began having bugs and issues like connection insatiability, service breakdown, and viruses. Although MSN tried to fix its issues and bugs, the slow update speed, the massive amount of spam, and its limited amount of functionality rendered these efforts useless.

But aside from bugs, these weren’t the only reasons it stopped being so popular and functional was the following reasons:

1- The emerging of new social media

Around the time that MSN started to become less and less popular because of the constant bugs and errors that kept happening, multiple social media sites and applications started emerging like Facebook and Twitter and Around 2007 smartphones were becoming more and more popular and were in the hands of almost every teenager and adult there was. That eventually led to people moving from MSN to Facebook and Twitter which made people flock to those apps more because of the more stable connection and server which meant fewer bugs while talking to people and friends.

2- Inconsistent Brand Positioning

MSN started to change it’s image a lot trying to fit in the competitive market that started to form around it, It stopped being the only social network at the time, and from changing its name from MSN to “Windows Live Messenger” to it changing its landing page to something users weren’t liking and were not comfortable with, Inconsistent Brand Image can cause your clients or users to trust you less and associate your brand with poor quality and getting forgotten because of the constant change, Which is exactly what happened with MSN because old users couldn’t recognize the social network anymore and preferred to use the new ones who still have a fresh and consistent image.

3- Unsatisfactory User Experience

MSN attracted people by its fresh and professional interface, but with the constant bugs and error, even the most loyal users started to become unsatisfied.

Almost all MSN users encountered problems like connection instability, service breakdown, and viruses, and Server shutdowns would happen two or three times a year.

Even though MSN tried to fix those problems as they happen, The damage has been done and users stopped wanting to use their service anymore.

What replaced MSN

Skype replaced MSN for a while because of the addition of Video Calls And Voice Calls, But in different countries like China for example some other similar websites and applications replaced it like QQ which was very similar to MSN with its features but with fewer bugs and errors.

Facebook was becoming more popular as well as Twitter, And Whatsapp which are still social media networks that we use now and are now unrecognizable maybe considering how far they have come since they first started but still kept their image consistent which is why they are still standing now.

Last Words

Finally, This post is not meant to criticize MSN but instead to learn from the mistakes that Microsoft made at the time and to learn from them to not do in our businesses and startups so we can make more successful enterprises and learn from the mistakes of others.

Lastly, I hope you have learned something from this blog post and I hope you can give me feedback/suggestions of what I can change or improve on the format or subjects and Thank you for reading.

Stay Safe & Well

Ola 

#msn #microsoft #communication #90s