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Oath is Killing Off Yahoo Messenger on July 17 (betanews.com)
Yahoo Messenger is to be discontinued in just over a month. Yahoo owner Oath has announced that it is killing off its famous Messenger service on July 17. From a report: After this date, chatting will no longer be available, and users have just six months to download their chat histories. At the moment, there is no direct replacement for Yahoo Messenger, but users are being advised that they can request an invite for the beta version of the invite-only group messaging app Yahoo Squirrel. In an FAQ about the announcement, Yahoo addresses why the decision to shutter the service was taken. "We know we have many loyal fans who have used Yahoo Messenger since its beginning as one of the first chat apps of its kind. As the communications landscape continues to change over, we're focusing on building and introducing new, exciting communications tools that better fit consumer needs."
As long as ICQ is still running, I am fine.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
I feel no love for Yahoo messenger, but if you are planning a replacement, discontinuing the current one is a really bad business decision. All your users will leave, when they could have been transferred easily by merely updating their clients.
This is how Microsoft went from 14% of the smart-phone market to 1% of the smart-phone market: by bringing out an incompatible version (in their case it was especially pathetic because the underlying OS was still based on WinCE, they just chose not to expose that to developers).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."