Microsoft Migrating Live Spaces Users To WordPress

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has decided it can't compete with the established blogging platforms out there and will instead embrace one of them. Talking at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Dharmesh Mehta, Director of Product Management for Windows Live, announced that all existing Windows Live Spaces users will be migrated over to an account at WordPress.com. This decision is one Microsoft has prepared for, and the CEO of Automattic, the company that runs and develops the WordPress platform, was also present on stage with Mehta. The two companies have worked together to ensure Spaces users will take all of their data with them when migrating and have visitors automatically forwarded to the new URL associated with their blog."

Comments

Gotta say, they picked a good one

[Pojut]

Wordpress is quite flexible, and super easy to install onto your own hosting server.

Re:Gotta say, they picked a good one

[Anonymous Coward]

Wordpress looks very clean on the outside, however the core code lacks quality. It's api is very easy and nice to work with, but beneath all these, global variables and functions speak for themselves, even if this is php we're talking about.

Re:Gotta say, they picked a good one

[h4rr4r]

Because that makes garbage HTML?
Really anyone who does that should be banned from the internets.

Re:Gotta say, they picked a good one

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would someone need office software, why can't they just use MS Notepad?

It turns out that customizing layouts (IE: you must be able to quickly make small or major changes or use templates made by others without having to modify the actual content in any way), adding plugins (galleries and whatnot), managing comments (how much links can there be? will they be visible before you've specifically checked that they're not spam? how will you ban certain commenters? Or give special rights to others?), observing visitor statistics, editing the entries, creating RSS feeds, etc... Is horribly difficult or impossible without a software customized for that. Yet, those are just a small portition of everything that is required from a modern blogging enviroment.

Now, you could just say "Why would you need a blogging platform? Why not some regular content management system (Joomla!, etc.)?" and you would be kinda correct. The distinction between a blogging platform and a content management system has been blurred. I've seen some rather large sites with high amount of visitors running on Wordpress. But generally, a CMS that has been specifically designed to be optimal for blogging is better for blogging (ease of use of the common tasks, etc.) than CMS that has been designed for large, corporate sites.

Re:Gotta say, they picked a good one

[Bobfrankly1]

Question from non-blogger:

Why do you need special software like WordPress? Why can't you just use standard MS Word or WordPerfect, convert it to HTML, and publish it online?

Maintaining a Wordpress style blog in Word or Wordperfect would be a nightmare. Sure, you could do a single page, but updating it would quickly become a nightmare. A purpose built tool like Wordpress also allows access from mobile phones. Also, do you want to allow people to post comments on your blog? Have fun getting that to work with Word. Take a peek, you'll realize that, like most things, there is more to it then there seems.
http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress
Disclaimer: I am not a Wordpress user, but I am related to one.

Re:Gotta say, they picked a good one

[kchrist]

Wordpress actually outputs very little HTML and what it does is valid. The front-end markup is 99%+ determined by the theme (aka, templates, skins, whatever) - the theme uses the Wordpress API to pull data but but the display is entirely up to the developer. You're blaming the application for the bad markup written by a theme developer.

And, for what it's worth, the default theme that ships with Wordpress is valid XHTML.

It's not as bad as I thought

[__aatirs3925]

For a minute I thought that meant all live users would have their accounts migrated over, but in reality it's just spaces users. I have yet to actually talk to someone who has a Live Space account and that's probably why Microsoft is doing the switch. That's probably good but do people still blog these days? Last I heard, millions of blogs are being abandoned because it's phasing out and takes too much time to maintain them.

IIS and ASP.NET can’t compete with Wordpress

[devent]

Wow. The most profitable I.T. company, the I.T. company that suppose to be the number one software company in the world, which have monopoly on operation systems and in the office market, officially admitting that their IIS, MSSQL, .NET and ASP.NET crap can't compete with Wordpress, an Open Source CMS system, running on plain old PHP and a MySQL database.

Mustn't that be a blow to all the Microsoft's chills and so called I.T. consultants that are trying in masses to convince small business and enterprise users to buy in to the ASP.NET stuff, that is suppose to be so enterprise ready and suppose to scale so well on the Microsoft IIS server? How are they going to convince anyone if Microsoft itself says "... it can’t compete with the established blogging platforms ..." with their ASP.NET and IIS Server 7.0 (which on live.com is running)?

Re:Microsoft

[PipsqueakOnAP133]

I'd say in this case, GPL shouldn't matter to them because they're interacting with a company that, according to wikipedia, controls over 50% of the project anyhow.

I'm not even sure Microsoft's actually doing any sort of source change or anything, which would essentially mean no license burden.

As much as people think there's some sort of conspiracy for/against GPL, I think many other things matter more. Like ease of use, ease of integration, and convenience. The biggest fear that any company has regarding GPL isn't that GPL becomes popular. It's that GPL will force them into releasing private code.

Re:IIS and ASP.NET can’t compete with Wordpr

[MozeeToby]

What is good for an enterprise is not necessarily good for your average blog. Well, there you go, that was pretty easy to spin (if you insist on calling a rational statement 'spin' anyway).

Re:IIS and ASP.NET can’t compete with Wordpr

[Anonymous Coward]

You're all making the assumption that this decision is a technical one. You could easily argue that if they were dropping their internal solution and would use a different solution but continued to host it themselves, but that is not the case. In either situation the application is so abstracted from the underlying platform that it is frankly of little relevance. This was a business decision; Microsoft is looking to stop throwing money at blogging.

Re:IIS and ASP.NET can’t compete with Wordpr

[FreelanceWizard]

You're claiming that the success or failure of an application is a direct condemnation of the infrastructure stack that runs it? On that basis, I could cite any LAMP application that was ditched for a Microsoft stack application and say that Apache, PHP, and MySQL can't compete with (insert name of Microsoft stack application here) running on plain old .NET and an MSSQL database.

Don't confuse the technology platform with the application. One can build garbage -- or, in this case, an unpopular site -- on any stack. In this case, as others have aptly pointed out, Microsoft dropped Live Spaces not because it didn't work or scale, but rather because it wasn't sufficiently profitable to justify the continued expense for its maintenance.

Re:IIS and ASP.NET can’t compete with Wordpr

[KarmaMB84]

Hotmail has over 360 million users which is quite a bit larger than the 30 million users they claim Spaces had. I don't see how scalability could've been an issue here. Now the fact that Spaces pretty much sucked to the point they're willing to take a hit on their Windows Live brand by jettisoning it is another issue entirely.

Re:IIS and ASP.NET can’t compete with Wordpr

[Anpheus]

Microsoft isn't an I.T. company, they're a software company. They've branched into different spaces sometimes, and they dogfood their own products for other companies, but Microsoft also has other companies, "I.T. companies" manage their I.T. There was a recent article about Microsoft switching vendors for I.T. support and help-desk personnel.

Maybe they just didn't want to support millions (ah, who are we kidding, hundreds) of bloggers anymore and decided Wordpress was a good place to shunt them off to. Everyone wins, really.