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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."
And the hundreds that read Live Spaces blogs?
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
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
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.
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 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.
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.
Because that makes garbage HTML?
Really anyone who does that should be banned from the internets.
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
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.
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