> I think what killed AIM, MSN, etc. was SMS.

The United States got SMS a lot later in the piece than other countries, didn't they? From my experience the opposite of what you said appeared to be true - what started to kill SMS here was services like MSN messenger and eventually facebook etc afterwards

Not only that, but SMS was extremely expensive in the US. If you didn't have a text plan, they cost $0.20-$0.30 a message, and unlimited plans were in the neighborhood of $30 a month. Texting didn't really take off in the US until the prices started coming down, and that didn't start happening until Google and Apple launched their own messaging apps.

I had the T-Mobile sidekick pre Android which ran AIM and I thought it was revolutionary at the time to not have to be on a PC.

The sidekick was so ahead of its time. Push AIM, email(including pop3!), an appstore. I still have fond memories of mine.

Not a surprise that Andy Rubin went on to build Android.

MSN was helped by the integration into the most used email at the time, hotmail. It was still pretty good, you could play mind sweeper on it with your friends, most of my international friends used it. they had a pretty good market penetration in China too.

Then MSFT was like, OK we bought skype. EVERYONE WILL USE SKYPE.

Yeah. I miss Messenger, it could have become what FB Messenger is now, but Microsoft decided otherwise.

I don’t think so. Most people I know (myself included) use FB Messenger because it already has all your friends on it.

MSN doesn’t integrate with your FB contacts automatically so not sure it could occupy the same spot.

For me what killed MSN Messenger was Microsoft. I would have not had a need to ever use FB Messenger were it not for the merge of Skype and Messenger. Both Skype and Messenger were good back then by themselves, but the result of the merge wasn't so convincing for me. I literally only use Skype to talk with my parents - noone else even uses it anymore...

I think MSN for me died when I finished middle school. Everybody kinda lost contact (going to different schools / apprenticeships) and we stopped writing.

Then new people I met (online and offline) were all using Skype. This was just right before Smartphones came out.

Then offline people slowly started joining Whatsapp or Facebook groups.

Online people stayed on Skype until Telegram took over a few years ago.