Tout sur ICQ de Mirabilis !

AOL bought Mirabilis :

After long weeks of rumours, Mirabilis confirms his buying by America On-Line. This page shows you the official release who is published on their site.

A letter to our users from the ICQ team

To our wonderful ICQ users :

All of us at ICQ have been deeply moved in recent days by your overwhelming response to reports that our service would be acquired. Never before has the web witnessed anything like your expressions of care and concern about the future of this unique service that we have created together.

In just 18 months, we have created together one of the world's largest Internet communities. Starting with just a loyal few, we grew to almost 13 million people as you brought your friends onto the service – with almost no notice. In fact, for a long time, other than our own community of early adapters and Internet centric enthusiasts, and a few specialized computer magazines, hardly anyone had ever heard about ICQ.

We never bothered to publicize ourselves or place ads in magazines, ... because we cared only about one thing: Making YOU, our users, happy with our wonderware. Day and night, we preoccupied ourselves with the goal of creating the most fantastic Internet experience the world has ever known. And your thousands upon thousands of expressions of gratitude tell us that we have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams We have done it with very humble resources, but we made up for it with a lot of enthusiasm.

However, like everything else in life, in a strange way success has its own price. In our efforts to address your great suggestions for new features and meet your expectations for a richer client, we had to build up our development staff. To meet the increasing demand for bandwidth we had to lease more and more T1 lines. To accommodate a community of 12 million users, we have had to buy more and more hardware.

And most important of all, since ICQ's first day ... in contrast to free programs offered by even the largest companies on the 'Net ... we made a commitment that we would try to respond to any question within 24 hours. But responding to hundred of thousands of your requests for technical assistance also required an increase in staffing.

Today, ICQ is growing at the rate of 1,000,000 new subscribers every 22 days – an unbelievable rate of growth for a service of our size and staff. While we are very excited about having 500,000 simultaneous users, it presents technical challenges that almost no one on the Internet has ever faced, challenges that the largest software companies are still wrestling with. So unless we took steps to expand the financial and technical resources available to us and expand our team, the very existence of ICQ would have been at risk.

So to ensure the long-term growth of our service, we began to look for a partner for ICQ ... one with the necessary technical and business experience and an understanding of the importance of community on the Internet.

But above all, we looked for a partner who would respect the wonderful thing we have created together ... and would ensure the continuation not only of its growth and development but its unique spirit.

Of the many fine companies we spoke with none expressed the enthusiasm for and trust in our product as the people of AOL, and we came to feel that this service would be the ideal home for ICQ.

In addition to having the bandwidth, infrastructure and know how ICQ needs today, we found that AOL shared our understanding of the importance of interpersonal communication on the Internet.
As demonstrated by the fact that AOL was the first company to create thousands of chat rooms on their service, AOL is also the only service we found who could help us in resolving our biggest challenge of all: having to face in just few months the need to handle 1,000,000 concurrent users at the same time.

Having more concurrent users then ICQ – 670,000 at peak usage – they have the neccessary infrastructure which is required, the understanding of the huge technical challenges such usage involves, and the technical solutions to resolve those issues. All of this will now be working for you, our users.

And because they expressed again and again their eagerness to maintain our special spirit and culture, ICQ will continue to be an independent company, operating much the same as before, led by us, your faithful young and enthusiastic ICQ Team, who brought to you all the wonderful ICQ goodies so far. But the true vote of confidence in ICQ's past accomplishments and its future potential is the huge financial commitment that AOL was willing to make – a mark of its deep interest in the future growth and success of our service.

Because AOL has asked us to continue to run the service exactly as before, we don't intend to make any changes in our policies. We will continue to offer the software and the service exactly under the same terms and conditions as before (time limited free beta). And of course, you will still be able to use ICQ No matter who your ISP is, or where you live.

In the true spirit of ICQ we will continue to provide you with the forums to share your opinion, whatever they may be, and we will continue to listen to them very carefully. Even if, as in the best of families, some times it is hard to get your considerations across, you are still the best family there is on the net, and we ask you to share your opinions with us.

All of us at ICQ are truly very enthusiastic about this arrangement ... which we see as a spring board to even bigger and better things for ICQ and you.

We encourage you to continue your active use of and support for our service ... and to look forward with us to the many wonderful things our relationship with AOL will allow us to do that we simply couldn't do before.

Warmly,

The ICQ team