Interview with Patchou

Why did you make messenger Plus!?

Most of the time, I’m starting to write new programs because of two reasons: I need something that does not exist AND developing it will bring me new knowledge. I wanted to have logs in Messenger and one day, I read an article about something called Hooking. That seemed interesting so I tried this up in Messenger. Three days later I had an automatic-logger working in Messenger and I supposed that it could be helpful to some other people so I started distributing it. Note that distributing software packages involves generally more time than to write it. You have to do an installer, an uninstaller and user-friendly dialog boxes and option windows. I took that chance to integrate the crack I made for Messenger some weeks before to remove the advertisement and, voila, the first version of Messenger Plus! was born!

Why do you think it became so succesful and what success did you expected it to have?

As for the other freeware I distributed, I thought that I wouldn’t have much success. The only thing I thought could help is the “Remove Banner” option and I really think that I helped a lot. A lot of people downloaded Messenger Plus! when I stopped updating my crack. Now, a very appreciated feature is logging along with things such as Personalized Away, Quick Icons and Quick Texts.

Are there any downsides to having a succesful MSN Messenger add-on?

I think it’s incredible to see how much Messenger Plus! is being distributed nowadays. I’ve worked on it for several months, nights and weekends and it paid of by bringing me lots of emails from people who enjoy this software. You can’t imagine how much I care about my users opinion. Seeing something like “this software is good for trash” on download.com, even if it’s among hundreds of very positive feedbacks, generally hurts me a little for a couple of hours.

I don’t earn any money with my software so my only goal is to make people computer’s experience more enjoyable.

I received about 10 donations and I warmly thank my donators. I’ve bought me some nice anime DVDs on eBay thanks to you . So, if some people think that I’m doing this for money, compute that: $100 for about 400 hours of work. Hopefully I have a real work! I always appreciate you to write me some messages and be sure that your requests are noted for future releases. During 3 months I ENTIRELY took my free time to develop Messenger Plus! so I think that I can rest now for a couple of weeks.

I earned $100 with your donations but I had some server bandwidth problem last year (I really didn’t expected that my user count would go from 1,000 to 50,000 in two months. I’ve stopped counted them but they must be somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 daily users) so, in fact, I lost money to develop Messenger Plus!, pretty scary isn’t it?

One of your features is parental watch, shouldn’t Microsoft include those?

I was an ICQ user some years ago and I’m sure that it’s the case for a lot of you. The reason why I stopped using it was simply that it became too big. I use Instant Messaging because that it is instant. I don’t want to have hundreds of buttons and features to choose from with tons of various ways to send text etc. I just want to chat with a friend, not a stranger, for a couple of minutes, some times for more than one hour.

I send plain text, my friend does the same and everything is kept simple. That may sound silly for some but I don’t want to ‘think’ about ways to do different things when I chat. I just want to chat. I’ve seen what ICQ has become now: advertisements in every chat windows, mass-annoying messages… it’s just not fun anymore. I'm not saying don't use ICQ anymore; I'm just saying that I personally like the simplicity of MSN/Windows Messenger. I don’t want Messenger Plus! or any other add-on to destroy this simplicity. I add logging, which is transparent, some small graphical features, Quick Icons and Quick Texts so that chatting is even simpler but that’s all. If you want tons of buttons, use ICQ.

So basically, I think that none of my options should have been implemented by Microsoft, except perhaps for the emoticon window and they did it in Messenger 4.5 (damn them… I worked hard on this feature and they released Messenger 4.5 some days before I release Messenger Plus! with my feature in.