The messenger with 330M users, that you will never use.

Apps have a personality: A lesson in how to NOT merge two products.

In the beginning, ICQ created instant messaging. And it multiplied into the three messengers: AOL, Yahoo, and Microsoft Live Messenger.

Of these three, Microsoft Live was the Godzilla. It was global (50 languages), pre-installed on Windows, and at it’s peak, it had 330 Million users (!).

And, it owned the Business real-time communication market.

Yes, in this market where Slack is now the fastest growing unicorn with 3 Million users — Microsoft Live had 330 and was active as recently as 2013. Granted, not all of those users were business users, but a LOT were.

And it was good. Not great, but still, pretty good.

As a business executive in a games company around 2006–2009, Live Messenger was my premier business communication tool alongside email.

It was always open on my screen,

I always had multiple conversations going on it,

It knew all the people on my teams (we had global offices)

It knew all my partners and clients — my business contacts graph

It had presence, I constantly looked to see who was available or not

It had groups, and they were persistent, so history was kept

It had video calls, and it could transfer files

It even had an internal application platform, limited — but with huge potential.

It wasn’t perfect, very far from it, and it wasn’t mobile at the time — but it had the core thing working. People had their business graph on it, and they were communicating. Everything else could have been built over time.

So Why did Microsoft close it down?

Because they bought Skype.

This is as stupid as Facebook closing down Whatsapp and Instagram because it has Facebook Messenger…

Products have personality. People attach expectations and habits to them, Skype was as an app for calling people. For many people it still is. You can say I’m not flexible — but if I’m not flexible, an early adopter, user experience builder, gadget loving geek, then who is?

From here, I have no inside knowledge, but I’m guessing a lot of territorial in-fighting, which resulted in this blog post: We’ve got good news to share! Skype and Messenger are coming together.

Don’t get me wrong, products can evolve and Skype evolved very nicely since then, but at the time, it was like gluing a horse to an eagle and hoping it would fly.

Big mistake.

Today, just 3 years after it was closed, messaging is the most important battle front in the world of tech. A guaranteed first-page icon on any mobile, with top engagement to boost, and its naturally viral.

In the consumer space, messaging is the fastest growing segment, and the app platforms inside them threaten the dominance of the traditional app stores. Bots are all the hype (although in my opinion, not ready yet for prime time).

But in the business space, I see an even bigger revolution coming, with real- time communication practically displacing email as the undisputed business king — my own email volume is down over 90% from last year, and it’s all moved to messaging. In business, messaging is also very monetizable.

Microsoft is there with Skype — but in my view, Skype and Messenger, even if close, were very different products and brands that should have stayed apart.

So what’s next?

The closure of Live Messenger left a huge gap in the business messaging market that wasn’t filled for years. Personally, I went back to email for a couple of years, and used Skype ad-hoc.

Now, this market is becoming exciting again.

Slack re-opened it with its take on team communication. But for non-geeks, it can be complicated (setups, shortcuts, integrations…), limited (the whole team must be on, hard to communicate outside teams), and demanding (it sometimes ends up creating more noise and stress than even old email).

That leaves a huge gap in what Live Messenger did best — super simple, fast, real-time business communication between any individuals and group of people regardless of what teams they belong to.

Enter Workgroup.

This is exactly what I’m working on right now. Warning: shameless plug. (Is it a shameless plug when its my own blog post???)

With my team at Workgroup, we want to bring back SIMPLE, group communication.

We have no team limitations (you can open a workgroup per project and invite anyone, from any company), there are no complicated set ups, and it’s very simple and clean — suitable for normal, non-techy users.

Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t look anything like Live Messenger, but once you start using it, you get that same sensation of true connectivity and ability to work in real-time with any group of people in the world.

Do check it out, by simply signing in on web.workgroup.im (so simple, we don’t even have a registration process) — you’ll be up and running in seconds, and let me know how it feels!

I’m the CEO and Founder of Workgroup, passionate about product and user experience, and you can also follow me on Twitter