After reading your article I freaked! I love using msn messenger, but I can't afford to pay. so I e-mailed "MSN Messenger Support" @ Microsoft and they had this to say...
[Start]
Hello,
Thank you for writing to MSN Messenger Service.
This is Christian and I am writing in response to your inquiry regarding MSN
Messenger.
There are no present plans for MSN Messenger to be subscription-based. I believe
that you are referring to MSN Chat's planned shutdown of its services this
October. No, MSN Messenger is a different service from MSN Chat and will not be
affected at all. You can still use MSN Messenger's free service to "chat" online
with your contacts even after this date.
For more information on this news, please visit MSNBC News or go to:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/970970.asp
Sincerely,
Christian
MSN Messenger Support
[end]
So you see MSN Messenger is and will still be Free! Yay!
From what I read it seemed like you were saying they were going to charge money
as seen here --->
"A newspaper costs 1 dollar, do you know how much it costs to buy, maintain and keep running the several monstrous servers of the MSN Messenger network? can you beging to imagine how many terabytes of bandwidth is necessary every week to let hundreds of millions of users connect to the service? how could some people dare beginning to say that this is a greedy act from Microsoft? being the manager of the Messenger team I would be completely amazed to read what I read on the article posted on mess.be. Aren't these people ashamed of what they are trying to do? they well know that it's very easy to blame Microsoft, saying things like "we will probably have to pass on the fees to our users", of course, I can already picture the news on their web site "our formerly free software now costs $10, it's not our fault, we are not earning anything from this, all the money goes directly into the pockets of uncle Bill. Click here to send a complaint to the MSN team and help us restore a free Messenger network!"."
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