Instant Messengers

Yahoo does it again as the most popular chat client, beating its arch rival MSN by a wide margin. We first gave out this award way back in 2001 and over this period MSN has won only once. Could this mean that MSN's popularity is coming down? In fact, we have the same question for the rest of the key chat clients. ICQ, which was the most popular IM at one time, barely managed to remain in the club, back in 2003. It's disappeared from the club ever since. Last year, we also had Rediff and Indiatimes in the club, but the duo have not mustered enough points to even make it into the club this time. Amongst all others that didn't make it to the club, Skype was at the top, followed by Gaim. 

Yahoo enjoys good support from all regions across India, beating MSN everywhere.MSN was strongest in the west, average in North and South, but needs improvement in the East.Interestingly Skype, which almost managed to get into the club, got most of its support from the south. Possibly it's still new and people are learning about it, and things will pick up in its favor next year. Speaking of people, then we found mostly senior manager/group head level of people using Skype. Another interesting thing we noticed was that the percentage of users for Yahoo reduces as one moves up the ranks. So the highest percentage of users for Yahoo belonged to the Executives and Assistant managers, while the lowest was CEOs and directors. For MSN, though its votes were lower than Yahoo's every where observed the opposite trend.