Closure of MSN Messenger – the price of failure to change

At its peak in 2008, MSN held a 60% share of the world market. On the Chinese mainland MSN in its early years of was synonymous with "best in class". In contrast, QQ was considered very much an inferior product at the time.

However, for MSN, the days of glory now seem like a distant dream. The number of active QQ users exceeds 700 million. The number of users of its sister product, WeChat, has now surpassed 600 million. As ever smaller numbers made use of MSN, Microsoft began to phase out the service on March 15 last year.