Wow. That’s quite a stat…when people say to me that Microsoft is new to this whole cloud thing, that’s what I’ll respond with. I have to confess for a while I wasn’t sure about calling existing services like Messenger and Hotmail “cloud services” but they genuinely are and it feels a little like the terminology has caught up with what has been going on for a while – namely that applications and services are being delivered across the Internet from remote data centers. Of course “cloud” has taken off as a meme as companies have realised this is increasingly a smart way to consume and build business applications and get the economies of scale from running in a data enter with not tens but tens of thousands of servers.

So are Messenger and Hotmail cloud applications or services? Yes, I think they are though they’re not cloud computing in the truest sense of that term as in my mind, that is more associated with the consumption of computing capability (i.e. compute cycles) on which you may build an app like Messenger. Simple huh? :)

Anyway…if you want to read more about the history and growth of Messenger, the product team has posted a great post with some incredible stats

Messenger users now represent:

• 65% of all Internet users in Brazil
• 48% of all Internet users in Canada
• 48% of all Internet users in Spain
• 47% of all Internet users in France
• 40% of all Internet users in Italy
• 39% of all Internet users in UK

• People use Messenger for 163 billion minutes every month, which is about 9.4% of all time consumers spend on the Internet worldwide
• More than 40% of our users sign in each day (more than 130 million daily users)
• Every day, those users share over 1.5 billion conversations and send more than 9 billion messages.
• And at peak times, that drives more than 40 million “simultaneous online connections,” (the number of people signed in at the same time).