November 2, 2008

Microsoft madness: kill MSN Groups

by Brian Turner

Microsoft, in their wisdom, have decided to shut down their long-standing MSN Groups feature, and are asking users to move their groups to Multiply.com before February 9th, when MSN Groups will be shut down.

This was announced just a couple of weeks ago, but it seems that quite a number of MSN users just aren’t aware of what’s happening at present.

Probably because Microsoft hasn’t actually emailed all members of MSN communities, but instead just sent mails to community managers, who have been provided a link to migrate out the data.

The overall move is pretty insane – MSN Groups represents a massive amount of published content, and by getting rid, Microsoft are simply looking to kill a major content base and advertising medium. So killing it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

However, what makes this decision truly mad is that Microsoft are looking to open up Live Groups, built and branded around their Live.com brand, which is intended to go live in November.

So why on earth are Microsoft destroying a huge section of published content and sending users to another service – and somehow still expecting these users, now burned and abandoned by Microsoft, should come flocking over to the new Live.com service?

While the MSN Groups traffic was believed to have been in decline for years, and while no doubt there are various technical challenges, it still represented a walled garden of content and users that Microsoft could have leveraged as part of its online development.

In an online marketing world, where the mantra remains to attract and keep users on your site, and when Microsoft continues to struggle to gain traction to its search engine and advertising platform, it is counter-intuitive for Microsoft to push away users, hoping they’ll just come back.

The failure of Microsoft to make every effort to migrate MSN Groups into Live Groups shows just how misplaced the company’s priorities are – if the internet and gaining marketshare are important, that is.

Microsoft has been running online communities for 13 years via MSN Groups – for many older internet users, this was their first Social Media 1.0 experience.

For Microsoft to therefore seek to kill it’s SM 1.0 platform and content and push users away, while additionally needing users and content for their SM 2.0 platform, shows a degree of short-sightedness that underlines why Microsoft has trouble competing with Google and Yahoo!.

Perhaps – as is so typical of Microsoft programming – they just can never be bothered to allow for the migration of legacy systems they have created into newer ones.

With an attitude like that online, they are likely to keep their online growth stunted.

In the meantime, anyone looking to use Microsoft’s online storage services when released should bear Microsoft’s past performance and mindset in mind.

After all, as Microsoft looks to move to digital storage, it’s hard not to be cynical that – in a few years time – Microsoft could end up just dumping that service onto another provider as well.

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Story link: Microsoft madness: kill MSN Groups

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