Microsoft Messenger Service not going anywhere just yet
Found on Ars Technica on Friday, 11 January 2013
What about all the people—and there are many of them—not using the regular, official, Messenger client for Windows?
Third-party clients such as Pidgin, Adium, Digsby, and Trillian use one or the other of these protocols to allow chat with Messenger users.
On March 15th, the Windows Messenger client will be blacklisted and unable to connect to the network, informing users that they must install the Skype client instead.
For instant messaging functionality, the Skype client is not the best thing going. It lacks any good equivalent to the tabbed chat windows that Messenger (and virtually every other instant messaging client) sports, and its support for media sharing is inferior to Messenger's.
I wonder who at Microsoft came up with that glorious idea; but I guess the "one program fits all" idea was part of the reasoning. MS has paid quite a few dollars for Skype and needed a way to move millions of users onto it, obviously because Skype also offers paid features. The problems Skype has (spying on users in China, incompatibilities and privacy issues) don't seem to interested Microsoft.