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It was MSN. I remember when MSN arrived late to the game, and managed to get users anyway, despite not having such an obvious feature, that the incumbent had.


The obvious feature was that ICQ was bloated and MSN wasn't while also MSN coming preinstalled with Windows.


But... offline messages.

We were on dialup back then. You could only send messages with MSN if the other person was also using the household landline at the same time.

Yeah Microsoft did not exactly play fair back then. Even Apple today is not as anti competitive as Microsoft was.

Also, I don't recall ICQ being bloated. Maybe it was later on.




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