quote:
Originally posted by The Blasphemer, msn messenger blog
MSN Messenger as a paid service?
March 31st, 2005 by TheBlasphemer
Today I got word of some microsoft employees that the company is not satisfied with the current profit-margin.
To make more profit, microsoft will be taking out a whole lot of functionality from Messenger, and only enable this on paid accounts.
Some of the features that are rumoured to disappear are the ability to choose your own display-picture, the ability to place people in seperate groups, filetransfer (although the free client will most likely be able to ACCEPT file-transfers), and last but not least animated emoticons in Messenger 7 will also be a paid-only feature.
As of now, I am not sure if it will be possible to bypass the paying, much like we did with bluemountain, but since this would be a lot of server-side, I fear that it will not, and the microsoft employees I have talked to stressed the fact that Microsoft is actually trying to secure MSN Messenger nowadays (anyone remember the test-phases?).
Patchou has also announced that if MSN Messenger would ever become paid, he will most certainly drop the Messenger Plus! project and try his luck on either Yahoo Messenger or AOL Instant Messenger, we think that those are the best available surrogates if microsoft will push it this far.
I currently do not have time to investigate more, since I will have to attend school in just a little while,
however when I get back I will try to get in touch with some other, higher placed, Microsoft employees for their view on the matter…
Bye,
TB
i really hope this wont be the case, if this is true i wont be able to do anything since i hjave no buddys on other programs, i really hope they reconsider
/ 
