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Microsoft Says Goodbye To WebTV/MSN TV
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has just notified both subscribers of MSN TV that the service would be ending at the end of September (FAQ for subscribers here). The service, which delivered Internet access to a TV screen via a set top box, was the evolution of WebTV Networks launched by Steve Perlman and others during the initial Web boom in the mid '90s. Microsoft bought the company for $503 million in 1997, when Bill Gates was still CEO."
I owned MSN TV and it was one of the best services of all time. So long, you will be missed...
...So?
The company that develops your product might decide to drop its support and you're screwed.
Of course, WebTV is direct competition to XBox One media center, they really don't want to support the old one anymore.
There were only 2 subscribers. Good that it stops, now.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
...the umpteenth set-top box business model that collapses. Siemens is trying, at this moment, in Central Europe. Why do companies try this business model so often, where it has shown only one consistency, namely that of failure everywhere ?
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Last time I looked, the hints were that Xbox1 would do the same thing as MSN TV.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
WebTV was my first introduction to the internet. We were too poor to afford both a new computer and an internet connection. I learned that using only a keyboard in a GUI is unpleasant. I learned that dial-up really is objectively slow. I learned that internet chatrooms are a place for desperate people to reach each other either for sex or for trolling purposes. I learned that internet porn is really something special. I learned that lesson a lot.
I also learned that spilling a beverage on a keyboard does in fact break it. So thats one experiment you don't need to try at home.
One of the few only good sites to Microsoft.
Microsoft are insane to have given up on their social projects like that, MSN Spaces was wonderful at the time, then they slowly destroyed it and made it less useful and more obtuse because "muh internet explorer is the best".
If only the current IE ecosystem was alive back then, maybe they wouldn't be so out of touch with users because they'd be focusing on features rather than trying to kill off any other users using it reliably.
Then they kill MSN and replace it with Skype. SKYPE. About as social as "mmm, uhh, hmm" and other such wonderful noises, and then awkward silence.
Not to mention considerably more broken than MSN ever was. Had nothing but trouble since Skype5. And the memory and CPU for a bloody chat client with video. Oh yeah it is all about the botnets and spying and PRISM I forgot.
Microsoft just do not get people.
And now they are also pissing off their biggest income: business users.
Oh, and just recently, the smaller business users with killing TechNet.
And that is going to bounce on towards the education sector and piss all over it.
And now there is the push towards Hardware and Services. Gotta looooove that Windows Phone. And those wonderful Windows 8 tablets that nobody is buying. Death of the PC. Pfft aha that will go so well.
I'm calling the death of Microsoft as a "giant" by 2017. After that it will become another AOL, hanging on for dear life doing... I have no idea what the actual hell they even do now. All I know is those silly tech help ads keep playing with that guy that looks like Robert Webb. .
If not, then they might finally fire that bald monkey and replace him with someone smart and fix the once actually fairly decent company gone corrupt.
Linux dropped support for my Core 2 Solo laptop because the ACPI hacks were too inconvenient to maintain. I can only run older kernels or Windows XP/7/8 on it.
The guy across the hall from me my first year at Princeton: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Goldman ... Growing up in San Mateo, California, Goldman attended San Mateo High School graduating in 1982.[1] He graduated first in his engineering class, Phi Beta Kappa, from Princeton University in 1986 [1], in a class that also included Jeff Bezos and David Hitz, founder of NetApp. He served as chair of Princeton's Computer Science Advisory Council, and in 1998, Goldman donated $2 million to his alma mater to endow a chair, becoming the youngest alumnus ever to do so. Goldman would go on to hold 19 patents, and had 30 more pending at the time of his death. ... Goldman also served as a director of BraveKids, a charity that uses the internet to provide information and support for families of children with serious illnesses. Goldman died of heart failure on December 25, 2003 age 39 at his home in Los Altos Hills, California. He is survived by wife Susan Rayl and their two children, Sydney and Josephine.[4]"
"Phillip York "Phil" Goldman (July 17, 1964 -- December 26, 2003) was an American engineer and entrepreneur best known for co-founding WebTV.
A nice guy and such a loss to his family. I talk about Phil some in the context of Princeton and his extreme "fat free" diet here: ... Phil was interested in his health, but with a competetive Princeton background, perhaps he did not have the time to explore all the issues to make much of that aspiration, or the social encouragement towards moderation in all things (even moderation) or towards making health and health related research more of a priority? And with so much competition in our society over selling products or for research grants, it is hard to sort out fact from distortion even when you try to be as healthy as you can. I too fell for a while for the oversimplistic meme "fat makes you fat", where the results of such a diet for most people is to get fat, since carbohydrates can make you fat, too, with related ill-health effects, especially if you miss other essential nutrients from your diet (or from sunlight). So, there are a whole web of issues here, both individual and societal, even if vitamin D deficiency and competetion might be very big ones."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
An excerpt: "Phil starts out aspiring, otherwise he would not have gone to someplace like Princeton, when California had a great public college system at the time like at Berkeley. Phil is surrounded by other aspiring people like myself at PU, but in a twisted context that prizes individual achievement and competition, and does not emphasize cooperation or balance. Princeton in that sense is an Ivy League ant hill. Phil and I are formed by Princeton University into (as Mr. Furious of the Mystery Men suggested) "little automaton droids"; essentially from our years at PU, we pupate from human beings into ants who go off programmed by PU to find and bring back money to the colony. Phil succeeds at bringing back a lot of money to PU, and I don't, but PU is playing the odds, it knows everyone won't bring back lots of money. Phil dies shortly after endowing a chair in Computer Science as the youngest alumni to ever do so (he was an amazing guy). PU doesn't really care about Phil's death (or whatever becomes of someone like me if I were to die trying to bring money back to PU) because there are always more ants. What does any ant colony care about the loss of one ant or even many in the pursuit of more resources for itself? So, in that sense, PU set up both both Phil and me to die in pursuit of profit for itself.
It's impressive WebTV lasted so long in an age of such rapidly changing technology. Still does not bring back Phil though.
More on healthy fats:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article11.aspx
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The problem is that these giant companies buy such companies but forget that the reason they are valued so high is because there is constant development and innovation. Companies like m$ buy it and then kill off the r&d, suck it dry for good engineers and reassign them. Then it becomes a dead project and a multi-million dollar write-off.
What a shame.
Assume Amazon, Netflix, etc., etc., go out of business, I can still use Plex or Playon to stream movies off my own LAN.
The really bad thing that would happen is the death of DVDs. DVDs were the single greatest thing to ever happen to the "public domain," copyright be damned.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Just MSN TV.
You'd think they'd offer an upgrade path to Xbox One. But no. That's not the Microsoft way. They didn't migrate PlaysForSure to Zune. They sort of migrated Zune to Windows Phone and Xbox Music. They're not good at gracefully supporting their content buyers as the technology changes.
Microsoft never understood. WebTV was never a replacement for a PC. It was never for the technically literate. It did work wonderfully for older folk or those who want email contact with family and friends and do not want to think about updates, BSOD, and other computer system turds. The user interface could be explained to older folk quickly, there were few surprises. You did not need a deep mental model of how it worked. Unlike smart phones it had a real keyboard that worked for folks with slightly impaired motor skills. It did not need a computer geek in the house to keep it running.
Its main problem was that MS abandoned it and let the software rot. There were increasingly amounts of web content that the WebTV box could not display.
Unfortunately, there is not really a good solution today. The tablets all have quirks that require deeper knowledge. PCs accessing GMail are the pits -- and Google keeps changing the UI (try explaining to an 85 year old why things are different).
I guess I was not clear -- an extreme low fat diet can apparently damage the heart or other organs.
Often the very things that lead to our success, like the ability to extremely focus on something, can also be our demise later on (in this case, possibly removing all fat from a diet as an extreme, done with the best of intentions based on mainstream medical advice). Whether a personal characteristic is a strength or weakness depends on context.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I always wanted a MSN TV 2 box and now I'll finally be able to afford one!
The original idea of WebTV was that it would be a simple web browsing appliance for people who didn't need all the power of a full-fledged computer, and didn't want to learn all the intricacies of Windows. The thing is, we now have other devices that do this even better: tablets and smartphones. And the non-technical crowd has transitioned to these devices en masse. We hear a lot about the so-called "post-PC era", but it isn't because experienced users have stopped using standard PCs. (They haven't, and won't – tablets and smartphones are much too limited to take the place of a real workstation.) Rather, it's because people who never used all the power of a PC in the first place decided to switch to devices that were easier to use, and didn't require antivirus software or weekly security patching. An iPad makes a lousy workstation, but for non-technical users, it's a better web-browsing/email/Facebook device than a Windows PC. And WebTV with its ancient hardware and firmware couldn't keep up.
I said good bye to Microsoft, like some 10 years back.
was the service realy that ill used? Just two subscribers?
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
....and that's saying something.
The inability of MS's teams to work together might have something to do with the atrocious stack ranking method they used for employee evaluation:
“If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”
That's from Vanity Faire from last year. I still find it hard to believe. I used to think Balmer hate was just sort of nerd posturing, but after reading that I realized, no, Balmer really is a clueless jack off doing nothing more than reciting the latest MBA buzzwords he learned from the latest business bestseller.
Now how am I supposed to browse Geocities?
How is it this half billion dollars is well spent ? Only if the "downside" possibility is worth the money spent. So I wonder how it is that Microsoft and HP and Google and Facebook remain profitable with all of the money they toss around on dead ends. After a while it all looks like good old fashioned money laundering, masquerading as investment....
Microsoft was printing money from sales of Windows and MS Office all through the '90s and first decade of 2010, so $500 million for WebTV was chump change for them. Gates probably didn't want to take a chance that this would be the next big thing. I think it was like FB buying Instagram.
So where do I send the computer illiterates that can't handle a PC?
"Microsoft has just notified both subscribers of MSN TV that the service would be ending..."
Yes, and I imagine the two of them are equally disappointed. (I'm sure someone already made that joke, but I couldn't resist...)
Seriously though, I was responsible for some of the (frankly torturous) menu music in the earlier WebTV firmware (ooh, .MOD files...) which I was never actually paid for because my cheque got lost in the shuffle when Microsoft bought WebTV Networks. I think I'm happier to be able to say that Microsoft stiffed me though (and more proud of that fact than the music I wrote), rather than if I'd actually been paid. It makes for a better story.
Surprised the platform has survived this long though...
It would be cool of MSFT to at least issue a firmware update that would let users choose their own homepage, and bypass the paid service, which is going away, of course; at least with the MSNTV2, it's a 733MHz Celeron, which should be able to handle rendering of most mobile sites, at least... there are lots of people who will be utterly lost without this service (my brother being one of them). I just bought one of the Google TV units to see if it will be a suitable replacement.
Dear MSN TV Subscriber,
For the past decade, we have been excited to build products that provided our customers with easy access to the Internet on TV. Unfortunately, all good things must eventually come to an end. Today we are announcing that we will be closing the MSN TV service. The last day of the MSN TV service will be September 30, 2013. We want this transition to be as smooth as possible for you. This letter explains what you need to do before the service ends if you want to have access to your email, favorites, Scrapbook photos, Page Builder pages, and any other data.
Before the MSN TV service ends, you need to make sure that all the users on your account have upgraded to Outlook.com (formerly called Hotmail), saved any favorites and Scrapbook photos to SkyDrive, and archived any published Page Builder web pages that you wish to save. We have created an MSN TV Closure FAQ that provides detailed information on how to do all of these. Please read it at http://www.msntv.com/msntv/ClosureFAQ.asp.
After you have upgraded to Outlook.com, your MSN TV email address, along with your existing email, will continue to be available for you to use. Outlook.com offers many advantages, such as accessing your email from a computer or smartphone that has a connection to the Internet. From a computer or smartphone, you can accessOutlook.com by visiting http://www.outlook.com.
If you would like access to your favorites and Scrapbook photos after the MSN TV service ends, you will need to copy them to SkyDrive before the service ends. SkyDrive provides storage in the cloud, so you can easily access and store your favorites and photos all in one place and sync with other devices. You can also share your photos on SkyDrive with family and friends. You can learn more about SkyDrive at http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/skydrive/overview from a computer or smartphone.
To ease the transition and help ensure you maintain Internet access, we will be providing some special offers for both the MSN Dial-up and Premium services. You will need a computer, Microsoft account, and active MSN TV subscription. Visit http://get.msn.com/msntv.aspx to view and sign up for one of these offers.
Many of you already have a computer for accessing the Internet. For those of you who do not, we recommend visiting the Microsoft Store for a wide variety of device options. Go to http://www.microsoftstore.com.
We want to sincerely thank you for your continued support of the MSN TV service over the years. We have enjoyed bringing this technology to such loyal customers.
If you have any questions that are not answered in the MSN TV Closure FAQ, you can contact Customer Support at 800-469-3288 between 6 am – 8 pm PST. Again, we want to thank you for your support and commitment to Microsoft products.
The MSN TV Team