Which Instant Messaging System Should I Choose: A Conceptual Model

Recent years, China has become one of the biggest market for International IT product giants have entered China market in recent years, such as MSN, Google, eBay, and Yahoo!. All of these products experience fierce competitions from indigenous IT products. Although indigenous IT products provide almost the same function as their international competitors, they dominate the market after passing the phase of imitation. What are the key reasons for their success? In this paper, we compare the detailed designs of MSN vs. QQ. By proposing a conceptual model, we investigate how the different functions of MSN and QQ lead to different users’ adoption intention. The conceptual model is not only helpful for researchers who are keen to investigate the factors which affect IT adoption process, but also shed light on how to understand users behavior and grab the market share for practitioners in China.