AIM — AOL Instant Messenger — was how a generation of Americans first talked to their friends online, and on December 15, 2017 it was switched off after twenty years. Launched as a standalone app in May 1997, AIM turned the buddy list, the away message, and the soft door-creak of a friend logging on into the texture of everyday social life. For students especially it was the after-school commons: you came home, you signed on, and the little window told you who else was there. It was the place a whole cohort learned what it felt like to be reachable.
At its height it was dominant. AIM reached roughly 61 million users by 2000 and held something like 52 percent of the US instant-messaging market by the mid-2000s, the clear leader over Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, and the ICQ network AOL also owned. Its cultural footprint outran even its user count: the away message — the little broadcast status you left when you stepped away — was a precursor to the tweet and the status update, a way of performing your mood to your buddy list before “posting” was a verb.
What killed AIM was not a better instant messenger; it was the disappearance of the need for a standalone one. Text messaging moved real-time chat into the phone in everyone’s pocket. Then Gchat folded messaging into email, and Facebook folded the buddy list into the social graph everyone already lived in. The behavior AIM pioneered didn’t die — it migrated into devices and platforms that did it without a separate program to open. AIM’s parent, AOL, declined alongside it, sold to Verizon in 2015 and folded into the Oath media division; by March 2017 AIM was down to single-digit millions of users, and keeping its aging OSCAR messaging protocol running for them no longer made sense.
This entry is wry about the corporate decline — a company once worth hundreds of billions reduced to a media-division line item — but gentle about the thing itself. AIM was where a lot of people had their first online conversations, their first crushes typed at midnight, their first sense of an internet that was social. It was outgrown rather than defeated, and that is its own kind of ending.
ICQ was the program that taught the world to chat, and on June 26, 2024 its owner switched it off after twenty-eight years. Built in 1996 by the tiny Israeli startup Mirabilis — five developers, including Yair Goldfinger, Sefi Vigiser, Amnon Amir, Arik Vardi, and the elder Yossi Vardi — ICQ was among the first stand-alone instant messengers to reach a mass audience. Its name was a pun on “I Seek You,” and for a generation it defined what real-time presence felt like: a green flower in the system tray, a numeric user ID you memorized like a phone number, and a notification sound so iconic that “uh-oh” still triggers Pavlovian recognition decades later.
The growth was extraordinary for its moment. ICQ was freely downloadable, spread by word of mouth, and at its peak around 2001 the service reported more than 100 million registered accounts. That success made it an acquisition target almost immediately: AOL bought Mirabilis on June 8, 1998 for $287 million up front plus up to $120 million in performance-based payments — a landmark price for a two-year-old chat client. ICQ then began a long ownership migration that mirrors a quarter-century of internet history: AOL held it for over a decade, sold it in April 2010 to Digital Sky Technologies (soon Mail.ru Group) for a reported $187.5 million, and Mail.ru later rebranded as VK.
Under each owner ICQ slowly receded in the West, displaced first by AIM and MSN Messenger, then by SMS, Facebook, WhatsApp, and the smartphone. But it never fully died; it lingered for years in pockets of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, where Mail.ru kept it alive. The end came as a corporate housekeeping note: VK announced in May 2024 that ICQ would close on June 26 and steered remaining users toward VK Messenger and VK WorkSpace.
What its users lost was less a tool than a memory — the first screen name, the first contact list, the first stranger met online. ICQ did not collapse in scandal or run out of money. It simply outlived the era it had invented, and was finally retired by a successor company with newer apps to promote.
Internet Explorer was the browser that conquered the web and then spent a decade as the punchline of it, and on June 15, 2022 Microsoft retired the IE11 desktop application for good. Launched in August 1995 as part of the Microsoft Plus! pack for Windows 95, IE rode the most powerful distribution advantage in computing history — it came bundled with Windows, the operating system on nearly every PC on earth — to crush Netscape in the first browser war. By 2002 and 2003 it held roughly 95 percent of the market, a dominance so total it became the subject of a landmark U.S. antitrust case over exactly that bundling.
Then, having won, Microsoft stopped trying. With Netscape vanquished, IE6 — released in August 2001 — was left to ossify for years, becoming a byword for security holes and broken web standards that web developers cursed and corporate IT departments could not escape. While IE stood still, the web moved: Firefox arrived in 2004 with tabs and standards compliance, and Google’s Chrome, launched in 2008, was faster and cleaner. In May 2012, Chrome overtook Internet Explorer as the most-used browser in the world. IE’s share collapsed, and the program acquired its enduring second career — the thing you opened once on a new PC to go download Chrome or Firefox, and then never touched again.
Microsoft eventually accepted the defeat it had inflicted on itself. It replaced IE with Microsoft Edge in 2015, and on June 15, 2022, after more than 25 years, the IE11 desktop application officially retired and went out of support, progressively redirecting to Edge. Legacy compatibility was preserved through “IE mode” inside Edge, which Microsoft committed to supporting through at least 2029 — a tacit admission that decades of intranets and enterprise apps had been built to IE’s idiosyncrasies and could not simply be abandoned.
What IE leaves behind is the canonical story of how a monopoly rots. It did not lose because it ran out of users or money; it lost because, once unchallenged, it quit innovating, accumulated a mountain of security and standards debt, and watched faster rivals dismantle a position that had looked permanent. The browser that once was the internet for most people ended as a compatibility shim and a meme.
Windows Phone was Microsoft’s genuinely good third mobile operating system, and it died not for lack of quality but for lack of apps. Launched as Windows Phone 7 on October 21, 2010, it broke decisively from the iPhone-and-grid template with “Live Tiles” — dynamic, color-blocked panels that surfaced information on the home screen instead of static icons. Reviewers praised the design’s clarity and originality, and on the well-built Nokia Lumia hardware it had a real argument as the most distinctive phone you could buy. By 2017 active development had effectively ended; Microsoft confirmed the platform’s last release would reach end of support on December 10, 2019.
The cause of death has a name developers used at the time: the “app gap.” A modern phone is only as useful as its software, and Windows Phone never attracted the breadth of apps that iOS and Android took for granted. The pattern was a vicious circle — too few users to justify the cost of building and maintaining an app, and too few apps to attract more users. Headline services arrived late, in crippled form, or never at all, and every missing or outdated app was another reason for a buyer to choose an iPhone or an Android instead. The OS could be elegant; the ecosystem was empty, and the ecosystem is what people actually live in.
The bet that was supposed to break the cycle made the failure catastrophic instead. In 2014 Microsoft bought Nokia’s devices and services business for roughly 7.2 billion dollars, aiming to control the hardware and force scale. In July 2015 it wrote down approximately 7.6 billion dollars on that acquisition — more than the purchase price — and cut about 7,800 jobs, overwhelmingly in the phone division. The numbers told the story plainly: Microsoft had spent billions trying to buy its way into a market whose users were already locked into two other ecosystems, and the market refused to follow.
Windows Phone’s discontinuation is the textbook case of the app-gap death and of network effects that money cannot purchase. It was not killed by a rival feature or a scandal; it was starved. A platform with no users gets no apps, a platform with no apps gets no users, and Microsoft, despite all its resources, never found the lever to break that loop before the loop broke the product.
Rdio was a beautifully made music-streaming service that almost everyone who used it admired, and on December 22, 2015 it was discontinued because admiration does not pay royalties. Launched on August 3, 2010 by the Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, Rdio married a large licensed catalog to an interface widely judged the best in the category — clean, fast, with social features that let listeners follow each other and see what friends were playing. It reviewed brilliantly. Entertainment Weekly called it the best app and online interface in streaming. For five years it was the connoisseur’s choice.
It was also, the whole time, losing the only race that mattered. Spotify launched in Europe a year before Rdio and reached the United States in mid-2011, and from there it simply outspent, out-marketed, and out-grew its more elegant rival on every axis that compounds in a network business. Rdio raised serious money — reported at well over $100 million, against the more than $200 million its backer Janus Friis poured in across its life — and still could not buy the scale that Spotify’s marketing, free tier, and partnerships were assembling. By the end, Rdio reportedly had fewer than 200,000 paying subscribers.
The economics were unforgiving. By 2015 Rdio was reportedly spending around $3.5 to $4 million a month, mostly on payroll, against roughly $1.5 million in monthly revenue — losing some $2 million a month with no path to closing the gap. When it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on November 16, 2015, court documents listed about $188.5 million in secured debt. The company that built the best product in streaming was, by every financial measure, a failure.
The end was a managed transfer rather than a collapse into nothing. Pandora agreed to buy Rdio’s technology and intellectual property for $75 million in cash, hiring roughly a hundred of its employees to accelerate Pandora’s own subscription ambitions; the deal closed on December 23, 2015, and the Rdio service went dark the day before. Rdio is the catalog’s clearest case of a hard truth founders hate to hear: in a market governed by network effects and the deepest war chest, the best product does not always win.