Microsoft has been a brilliant company at permeating (and ultimately dominating) the market for personal computer operating systems. And as well, they have become the most dominant player in the corporate communications market, through such difficult to use but well presented communications tools as Outlook. However, in some other areas, such as the smart phone market, they are having a lot of difficulty gaining the sort of traction that one needs to have, in order to take on a dominant (or even a truly competitive) position among the consuming public. One of their least successful forays into communications has been MSN Messanger, the biggest dog of all of the instant messaging and chatting programs.
But why is no one using MSN Messenger? It does have the same basic features as all of the other IM programs out there have. It allows you to speak with people all over the world, for free, at any time that you want. You can add friends, be invisible when you just want to be notified when you receive an e-mail on hotmail, and… unfortunately, that is the full extent of the program’s features. It is not competitive with the other major IM programs, Skype and Yahoo Messenger. And while the differences between MSN and the other two programs might be small, they are noticeable enough that they have kept most people from using the program.
For one thing, you do not have the capability to build a profile on MSN Messenger. While most IM programs are not very good about this, Skype’s is the most user friendly on the viewing end, and Yahoo’s gives you the most options for completeness. Not having any kind of a profile is just not an option, if you want to have a competitive IM program. Another problem with MSN is that there are no chat rooms. While you could argue that they generally just become bot farms, they are how chatting people meet.