Microsoft's Messenger is a mess of confusion

I received an email recently from “The Messenger Team” instructing me that “it’s time to upgrade to Skype”.

There may even have been an exclamation mark there, ensuring that I did not fail to appreciate the urgency – it’s not that it’s almost time, it’s time RIGHT NOW so why haven’t I done it yet? You’d think I’d have got some forewarning.

I took me a moment, I must admit, to figure out who this “Messenger Team” might be. It sounds a bit like a religious organisation – a crack squad of Jehovah’s Witnesses who are called upon when the standard messaging techniques fail, perhaps.

“This guy’s put his complimentary copy of The Watchtower in the recycling – call out The Messenger Team!” I bet they have cool music.

But no, this was from Microsoft. And “Messenger” is what they’re now, for as long as is necessary, calling the product formerly known as MSN Messenger or Microsoft Messenger or Windows Live Messenger (and possibly some others I no longer recall), and which my mother-in-law calls “MSN”. I can only guess at what she’ll make of The Messenger Team.

(Actually, Messenger was more than one product, and for quite some time had a bafflingly complex set of incompatible back-end infrastructures for corporate versus consumer customers and so on, which Microsoft struggled to reconcile.)

Here’s the thing, though – I don’t remember the last time I used Messenger in any of its many and varied forms. I certainly have used it – I had a Hotmail account once, too. But I long ago left it behind in favour of better products. Like, for example, Skype. 

My mother-in-law also abandoned “MSN” for Skype, largely because she got confused by the sudden requirement for a Windows Live ID. In the kerfuffle that followed, she ended up with a bunch of new IDs and passwords for various Microsoft bits and pieces, and a general level of confusion and dissatisfaction with the whole thing. Now she doesn’t use any of it.

I have a suspicion she is not alone. The Messenger Team uses interesting language in its email. Mostly it’s about the need to “update” to Skype, but a couple of times the word “upgrade” sneaks in there as well. The implication, of course, is that there is some continuity – that Skype is a newer, better iteration of the old product.

It isn’t, of course. It’s a competing product that Microsoft bought last year for the rather extravagant sum of $8.5 billion – one of the more spectacular “if you can’t beat ‘em” gestures in memory. It’s also a product that doesn’t currently exist on Windows Phone, though Microsoft says that will happen “soon”. It’s been saying that for a while.

Will Microsoft switch off Messenger before Skype is available on Windows Phone, leaving its own mobile platform as the one place you can’t communicate with your buddies? It’d be a bonehead move, but nothing would surprise me.

What The Messenger Team should have said in its email is:

“On the off chance you still remember your Messenger ID, you’ll be able to use it from now on to log in to Skype. Why you would do that instead of just using your Skype ID, we don’t know, but hey, you’ll be able to see all your old Messenger buddies – although they’ve long since switched to Skype too. Sigh. We give up.”

Matthew JC. Powell doesn’t remember his Messenger ID. You can reach him on mjcp@me.com