About a year back Microsoft shut down its MSN Messenger in favor of Skype. Messenger was shut down in the whole world except China because it was still very popular in China. Now the time for China is also over as Microsoft will permanently shut down its service in China as well on October 31st this year.
Chinese users as well will now have to move to Skype. Original contacts of users will be safely migrated to Skype and each user will get $2 credit for Skype calls and every one of them will be moved to Skype by October 31st 2014. Chinese users are getting emails from Microsoft on their Hotmail accounts that they should start shifting to Skype now.
MSN Messenger was launched in 1999 to rival AOL’s AIM service. It had 330 million users even in 2009 but Microsoft acquired Skype and people started shifting to Skype and it grew with 300 million users in 2012.
So 15 years of glory come to an end and from next month, MSN Messenger or most recent name Windows Live Messenger will be the part of history.