NetMeeting helped to pioneer online conferencing when it was released in May 1996, before the advent of instant messaging (IM) and other services for real-time online communication.

The software still ships as part of Windows, and some of its features, such as whiteboarding and application-sharing, are used by the MSN Messenger and Windows Messenger IM applications.

But NetMeeting has served its purpose and will gradually be phased out, says Microsoft spokeswoman, Stacy Drake.

Microsoft has already stopped development work on NetMeeting and links from MSN Messenger and Windows Messenger will be cut in future updates to those products, she adds.

Instead, Microsoft's IM applications will link to Office Live Meeting, Drake says. "Since buying PlaceWare we will focus our real time collaboration efforts on Office Live Meeting," she adds.

Microsoft completed the acquisition of PlaceWare in April, and launched a new version of the service in September.

Microsoft also plans to remove NetMeeting from its Web site, Drake says. The NetMeeting directory already appears to be gone, which means that users have to type in the IP address of the person they want to conference with. Drake does not give a time-frame for the NetMeeting phase-out, saying only that it will be "gradual".

NetMeeting has been used mostly for online conferencing between small groups of people. Large companies like Dow Chemical supported NetMeeting on thousands of PCs as a collaboration tool to save travel costs, according to a March 1998 Microsoft announcement.

Some businesses still use NetMeeting, although IM and Web conferencing products outclass it in terms of usability, analysts say.

"Should the industry mourn the loss of NetMeeting? No," says Mike Gotta, senior vice-president at Meta Group "It was significant on the timeline and was widely used because there was no big alternative. For those who standardised on NetMeeting, this will force them to make what is a good decision anyway, which is to get off it."

Robert Mahowald, a research manager at IDC, agrees. "It was never a very good conferencing tool. It was the kind of thing that ICT was reluctant to touch and users had to set up themselves," he says. NetMeeting died when better, competing products, such as IBM's Lotus Sametime, came out, he adds.

NetMeeting's retirement is unrelated to a patent infringement lawsuit involving the product that Microsoft lost earlier this month, the company says.

A jury ordered the software maker to pay $62,3m in damages for infringing on a technology patent held by a division of manufacturing and technology company SPX.

SPX subsidiary Imagexpo sued Microsoft in October last year for infringing on its patent with the whiteboard feature of Microsoft's NetMeeting. Microsoft contested the accusation.