Killed for Skype, which was already declining by that time. Microsoft was keen on unifying their IM platforms, but failed to realise that unless the migration path is incredibly smooth, people just won't do it. And the value of any chat service is that the people you want to talk to are on there. Many people didn't bother migrating from MSN to Skype and that was the end of it.

The Skype team at the time was also run with the mindset of "developer happiness comes first, users come second", a relatively popular mindset in the 2010s, and shipped large app rewrites with missing features and usability regressions.

Of course, they eventually killed Skype too. The MSN users never went to Skype and the Skype users just progressively jumped ship to FaceTime/WhatsApp video/Google Voice to replace video calling and VoIP, respectively. By then you had a former shell of what Skype was and Microsoft figured they should just shove the remainder of their users into Teams.

Similar to the Google Talk > Hangouts > Google Chat tragedy.

I was still using Skype to talk with my parents when they pulled the plug on it, too. Obviously (and unlucky for Microsoft), that conversation never moved to Teams. Curious how many users they lost with that move.

They used to be part of your ISP. You got a usenet server, and a mail server and a web server with a certain amount of space, just as part of signing up.

This meant that everyone had one, you didn't have to go sign up somewhere else. You still could if you wanted to have a URL that didn't have your ISP's name in it.

I guess mainly because of insta, facebook and other social media platforms, but I am a fan of old days. But our numbers are pretty limited compared to the mass.

Of the people I know in tech roles, there are far more who have no online presence at all.

Personal pages were once an option in those people's minds (i.e. get around to it later). Then it got bargained down to social media profiles. Now anything at all has become a liability and the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

I think that's what they mean.

The trust is dead, though. Not by all, but not by none either.

Not only I guess. I remember buying a minidisk instead of miniCD __by accident__ in the '00s in Russia. That was literally the only time I saw one in person.

My parents got me one in 1999 after years of me asking. It was such a disappointment when mp3 players like iRiver came out soon after (that should have a page on the graveyard) and then iPod came out. The iRiver and similar product used flash memory too.

Also I disagree with the minidisc distribution being an issue. They were less popular but, in the U.K. at least, album releases in minidisc format were available in supermarkets as well as music and electronic retailers.