[sanderjd]

I need to remember to remind myself of this more often!

The one I remember so clearly is back when I was using Pidgin (or Adium I think was another thing I used?) with a few different messaging apps, and my company was trying to figure out how to make chat work, maintaining an irc server that we of course couldn't get the non-nerds to use, looking at HipChat and a couple others that seemed really expensive for their feature set at the time. Basically none of this stuff supported mobile well.

This was 2008, maybe 2009. I remember thinking "this all sucks, but it's waaaay too late to make a chat app; I've been using IM apps for over a decade, totally saturated and commoditized".

But then I watched the rise of WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Slack, all of which were tiny or non-existent at the time, and became gigantic businesses.

[code_duck]

I remember ICQ and Aim. It's not even clear to me why they died and were replaced, but that sure did happen.

[lesuorac]

AOL actively wanted AIM to fail.

https://mashable.com/archive/aim-history

[sonicanatidae]

ICQ is used a great deal outside the US. Aim, well that's AOL, so reason enough.

[scarface_74]

Isn’t that the ultimate survivorship bias?

[Macha]

In terms of who the winners were, sure. There were many also-rans like Viber or companies that won only in certain markets like Line or Telegram.

But the idea that the network effects couldn't be overcome was definitely false. Not only are MSN, AIM and YIM so dead their servers are shut down, but the services which displaced them (Facebook Messenger and Skype) have themselves been displaced by a third wave of services (WhatsApp, iMessage, Discord, Slack)

[cguess]

Viber is still big in certain places like the Philippines.

[pjmlp]

And several Mediterranean countries, it is easier to reach someone on Viber than WhatsApp.

[sanderjd]

My point wasn't about the specific companies that "survived" chat, but that any new chat products got huge after 2008 at all. From my perspective back then, I thought the whole category looked run out. But it had actually barely even gotten started, if you compare the number of users of chat apps back then to the number now.