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Spam Causes Microsoft To Kill Newsgroups
eldavojohn writes "Some 2,000 public and 2,200 private newsgroups devoted to and managed by Microsoft support are going to be phased out in favor of forums because of newsgroup spam. The Register calls it 'killing newsgroups' but Microsoft eloquently calls it 'the evolution of communities.' Always managing to spin it in a positive light! Let's hope the spam posts and voting bots in their forums remain controllable."
"Not everything the company does is bad." -- Yes it is. It's Microsoft for God's sake. It's what they do. They are here to be evil.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
So, what exactly are they trying to achieve? Obviously this isn't being done to fight spam. Why does Microsoft hate it's customers?
MS hates its customers because they are customers, who demand things. And as they are customers, they are always right (they have money to give you).
MS wants to deal with consumers, brainless fuckers that just buy what they are told, and will go as far as indebting themselves to significant fractions (or over 100%) of their salary just to get the "latest and greatest"[1] products.
As for why MS are ditching newsgroups - it is all about control. With a website they control who posts, they control who reads, and best of all for them, they can slap adverts on the pages too.
Web 2.0 is just proprietary software 2.0. All the downsides of proprietary software on the desktop, with the added bonus that the application and your data isn't on your computer any more. So the application can be changed at any time (cutting support costs for the vendor - there is only ever 1 version of an app to support), and probably anything can be done with your data too.
[1] So says the marketing info.