• Vicente Moranta on Microsoft Messenger claims twice as many active users as Skype

  Maybe it is not so hard to believe if you approach it this way:

  First, an active user doesn't mean a human being:

  I am three Windows Messenger active users:
  - One account for work (using my work e-mail address)
  - One for my home computer
  - One for my Pocket PC

  Second, I'm an equal opportunity user-creator: I have three Skype users for different computers/PDA throughout the house + one dedicated to skype-in only (redirected to call my parents).

  Therefore being a Skype user does not exclude being a Windows Messenger user. And that applies to all IM communities. For example, while at home, I am an active user of Live Messenger, Skype and Google Talk (and Yahoo on Sundays to chat with my NFL buddies). When I am at work, I'm on Windows Messenger and I continue to be on Google Talk.

  It only takes 133 million human beings with my IM/Voip requirements to come up with 400 million Windows Messenger accounts.

• aaytch on Microsoft Messenger claims twice as many active users as Skype

  The bottom line is that Messenger, Googletalk, AIM, Skype, and YahooIM are all in the same general area in terms of comparable active users.... between 10 million and 40 million apiece.

• aaytch on Microsoft Messenger claims twice as many active users as Skype

  When Messenger and Yahoo started talking about IM interoperability last fall, some claimed that the combination was to have about 275 million total accounts. Another measurement from the same era had MSN Messenger at 24.2 million "active" accounts. Since then, as we all know, Skype has been growing rapidly, and so has Googletalk. So when you come along with numbers like 400+ million "active users" for Messenger alone, it's a little hard to believe.

• aaytch on Microsoft Messenger claims twice as many active users as Skype

  Phil,
  You don't actually believe that " Messenger users make about 10 million daily video calls", do you?

• Jean Mercier on Microsoft Messenger claims twice as many active users as Skype

  It is anyhow a real sickness in IT and related businesses to inflate numbers (and elsewhere!). Even Skype, claiming 100 million users some months ago, was in fact forgetting part of a word.
  What they meant was 100 million USERNAMES. I am sure this is a deliberate mistake. Marketing strategy!

  The real number of regular users is about a factor 4 lower, as can be found in one of the slides of Ebay from the beginning of the year.

• ZOverLord on Microsoft Messenger claims twice as many active users as Skype

  Rule #1 - Just because someone has Automatic Updates set to ON, or was required to use the "Passport" interface during their lifetime, does not mean they are part of your "Active Users" community. :P

• Craig on Microsoft Messenger claims twice as many active users as Skype

  YOu guys are confusing Users and contact records. The records include things like City, Address, Phone number of each user. So its not unlikely there are 12 billion records for 400 million users.

• Phil Wolff on Microsoft Messenger claims twice as many active users as Skype

  aaytch - The numbers really are millions. and they are mindblowing. and i believe them. Microsoft's online community has been around a long time. It has many touch points that bring people back into contact with their services. And their services increasingly feed off of each other, so a user's marginal cost of adding a new service falls quickly while the marginal benefit of adding a new service grows.

  For example, look for Spaces users to be able to adapt Messenger buddy lists into blogrolls that not only update with new blog posts but that show presence too.

• aaytch on Microsoft Messenger claims twice as many active users as Skype

  Complete Nonsense. Those statistics are off by a factor of at least 10, and it might even be 1000..... possibly due to the fact that "M" means "mille" (thousand), not "million".

• ZOverLord on Microsoft Messenger claims twice as many active users as Skype

  Now...If they could only find methods to use this large group of people to help fix Vista then Santa would be posting more jobs for Elfs :-)

• continued in the Skype Journal Comment River: 200 fresh comments

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