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

Microsoft

[DaMattster]

On one hand, this is an interesting move. On the other, I am surprised that they would go with WordPress because it is a GPL product. The GPL is an anathema to Microsoft precisely because if they modify the source code, they must contribute changes back. Perhaps, it is possible to extend WordPress through closed source plugins; although even that is to navigate a minefield.

Re:Gotta say, they picked a good one

[rident]

Yeah I couldn't handle either mess. I've built some of my web apps on DooPHP which I've found to be really well coded (building a blog would be a snap, in fact it's one of their demo apps) and based a couple communities on Simple Machines Forum, which is kinda messy on the backend, and another on Vanilla Forums which is actually quite nice underneath.

http://doophp.com/
http://vanillaforums.org/
http://simplemachines.org/

I'll submit an anecdote

[Anonymous Coward]

It was less than two years ago when I registered to wordpress.com. But when I tried to log on, I couldn't. It took a while for me to realize the reason: My password had < character that had been changed to the HTML entity. (IE: If my password would be "I<3Slashdot" it would have been changed to "I&lt;Slashdot") At this point WP wasn't taking its first steps or anything! So, if they still had problems with something as basic as what fields to escape (and how) when people register a new account, I'm sure that the code is rather horrible.

Didn't they get the memo?!?

[BRSloth]

And ten days ago... http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/09/16/2052244/Microsofts-Chief-Exec-For-Latin-America-Says-Open-Means-Incompetent

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

[devent]

But it's not any random software company. It's Microsoft, which try to push their software stack to small to big enterprises. Their software stack is IIS, .NET, ASP.NET and MSSQL. And now they are admintting that their software stack can be replaced by the plain old Php with plain old MySQL server.

Space was not only a blogging platform, it was an advertisement for their software. If that was any random software company with ditches their own software and go with an open source solution I would not write that down.

Microsoft own words are "... it can’t compete with the established blogging platforms ..." and not "it's not profitable and we are need to think of the stakeholders". As I said, MS try to push their software stack really hard against the establish Linux,Apache,Php,MySQL and here they are admitting that "... it can’t compete with the established blogging platforms ...". How many Man-Hours and money have they invested in Spaces?