Randomly Mine: VOIP

Remember MSN Messenger?

When logging off of Xbox Live for the day, there's a group of people I'd interact with on MSN, talking about Linkin Park's A Thousand Suns, how dead Myspace was, and all with the curses and slurs I won't repeat here. It was a different time back then. I've got memories of crappy webcams reacting to plays made on Uno.

Though the program certainly had its issues, one of the most obvious stemming from my friends account, who would say something to the effect of "Hey sexy, want me to suck your dick tonight?"

Viruses were quite hilarious when you weren't the one spamming people's timelines with sudden sexual requests, but there were sadly some much more sinister ones that'd steal information, infect your PC, and other such inconveniences that moved people away, without a more polished software to use. This was the time of Ventrilo and Teamspeak.

However, there did exist such a program, called...

SKYPE.

I tried desperately to move my friends to it! Fuck AOL, MSN, and Yahoo. Move to Skype! It's clean, it's easy, it's fast, and best of all, we don't have to split server payments just to host a decent conversation!

"Nah" said my friends.

I don't want to make a new password. I don't want to sign my email address again. I don't want to add people again to a new program.

It'd take a solid year or two before friends finally got tired enough of MSN, AOL, Yahoo, and whatever else's collective BS, and move to Skype's clean and calm aesthetic.

Just to be bought by Microsoft a month later.

The change was almost overnight. Suddenly dropped calls, poor performance, constant updates, etc, became the norm. Suddenly, playing Tick Tack Toe on MSN to kill time seemed like a vacation compared to this shiny turd. 

My refuge was Teamspeak. Sure, it sucked to pay for servers, but at least they worked and had decent quality, where friends that retreated to Google Hangouts had to constantly make new chats interrupted with disconnects, poor quality, and glitches galore.

This was the landscape for over a decade, and why Discord became such a phenomenon. The incompetence of Microsoft, the inaccessibility of Teamspeak, the inconsistency of Google, is what allowed programs like Discord to walk all over them.

Sometimes, a product doesn't need to be amazing. It just needs to do what the others haven't figured out yet. Often I find niche markets are pointlessly niche. Small, because no creator has done the work to make it accessible for those without the same knowledge base as themselves.