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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."
Wordpress is quite flexible, and super easy to install onto your own hosting server.
Living With a Nerd
And the hundreds that read Live Spaces blogs?
Pigs were seen flying over central park.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
I cannot even remember when this was first announced, let alone anything since. I guess Microsoft's ability to push their services ain't what it used to be...
-MT.
-MT.
DEAD.
Good riddance.
Yours In Moscow, K. Trout
Oh God! I hope not! We need Microsoft! They're the only ones that are checking the power of HP, Oracle, IBM, and most of all APPLE! MS is kind of like the United States in their power. Yeah, they fuck up quite a few things but without them, petty tyrants would have their way. Just think if Apple became the Super Power. For one, Flash would be killed .......
Die Microsoft! Die! Die! Die!
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
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.
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)?
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
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).
The GPL only requires that you make available the original source, and your changes to it, to anyone who receives the executable form from you, and you must make them available without restriction as to how they are used. If you don't publish the executable, there is no requirement to publish source and changes.
It simply boils down to "was LiveSpaces paying for itself?". And the answer would be no, so now MS gets to have a PR day while dumping a cost centre onto someone else. Double win for MS - doesn't say anything about IIS, Asp.net or MSSql one way or the other tho.
Ironically, I came to read the comments here while waiting for my webmail to load. By the time I finished reading these comments, the spinner on my other tab had stopped. The result?
The parent is right. I try not to get involved in platform wars, but the same hardware running windows + mssql + iis + asp.net simply cannot keep up with any *nix + mysql + apache + php stack. Not to mention the security vulnerabilities. The only reason msft products are as popular as they are is because msft spent decades perfecting a business model that involved cultivating relationships with consultants and resellers who would do *whatever it takes* to convince their customer to buy a msft solution. Second biggest reason for their success was enterprise purchasing policies whereby the company would rather buy the crap they knew than take a risk on an unknown. Third was msft purchasing products that actually were well-made (and eventually turning them into pulp - even Excel is starting to go that way).
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Not to be confused with Col.
Microsoft may not like GPLv2, but at least it's not GPLv3. There's only basic patent language in v2, and v3 really turbo-charges the language, providing much better protection from software patent lawsuits.
But in some ways it's a moot point, as Microsoft won't be hosting or distributing any of this software (AFAIK), they're just pointing some of their customers over there for service.
And hey, if it throws some extra money towards Automattic, then that's cool, too.
coding is life
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).
It's spin because it's plausible, but factually incorrect. From the Wordpress.com website:
There are over 27 million WordPress publishers as of September 2010: 13.9 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com plus 13.8 million active installations of the WordPress.org software....
According to Quantcast, over 260 million people worldwide visit one or more WordPress.com blogs every month, and they view over 2.1 billion pages on those blogs each month....
(Bolded for your convenience.)
A chart showing Wordpress performance vis a vis Blogger, Movable Type and Typepad.
Smells like enterprise to me.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
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<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.
And ten days ago... http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/09/16/2052244/Microsofts-Chief-Exec-For-Latin-America-Says-Open-Means-Incompetent
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.
The Freelance Wizard
I needed a shower after reading that. I can't imagine how you will ever feel clean again.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
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.
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.
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?
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute