Re:Why are the Buddy lists not local??? (Score 2)

I am assistant manager at a large (~100 seats) internet cafe in Australia. It's in this situation where I see Messenger as a far superior product. Users from all over the world come in, log in to messenger, and instantly have thier contact list (when microsoft hasnt sent the data into the ether that is) up in the application. These travelers use the microsoft hotmail/messenger combination religiously. Meanwhile, with ICQ, which has a local user list, each different computer they use needs to have the user list re-instated. You might argue the you could carry round you icq user list on a floppy, but it is alot of muckin round to add another user on icq, add in your user list, and then make sure it is all removed when you leave. Even though messenger has remotely stored user lists, looking at the data accounting records, an instance of ICQ uses alot more bandwidth than msn. Laugh you might, be here the cheapest data rate we can get is ~$190/gb, and line rental is expensive so we get by on a 256kbps ISDN, & extremely aggressive proxy server. Thus every byte of non-cacheable data is important. That said, personally i prefer ICQ, albeit that i use an older version (i hate the clutter & ads of the newer versions). Dave ICQ#: 908664 :P