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Microsoft surrenders Live Spaces future to WordPress

Microsoft's killing another me-too Web 2.0 service, sinking its fledgling Live Spaces blog network and shifting 30 million users to WordPress. The director of Windows Live product management Dharmesh Mehta revealed Live Spaces' execution order during a gushing partner announcement with WordPress' parent Automatic on Monday that …

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Anonymous Coward
Gates Horns

Wow, the MS business model truly has changed

never did I think I'd see the day that Redmond would drive business to a competitor rather than buy them out or bury them

Paul Ireland

Office Live website builder too?

If Microsoft are forcing their Live spaces blog users to move over to Wordpress.com, it makes sense to me that they will also close their free website builder Office Live in the future too, since Wordpress.com should be able to do what the Office Live sitebuilder does. Wordpress isn't just for posting blog posts, it allows normal websites with normal web pages to be built too, so wordpress.com is a hosted website builder as much as it is a blogging platform too. Those users that have a Microsoft Office Live website with a Live Spaces blogging section linked within the website, will probably realise this Wordpress.com can do both once they move their blogging over.

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

By the way...

Wordpress is owned by the Wordpress Foundation with backing from Automattic (2 T's)...

Roger Greenwood
Thumb Up
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Same here

I love 2 x T's. As does Matt.

GrantB
Boffin

Choke.. MS moving users to

PHP, MySQL? I assume that most Wordpress users will be migrated to a full WAMP stack.

I never thought I would see the day. Back when MS brought Hotmail, they switched over users to Windows servers, but here they are handing supposedly 30 million users over to run on open-source platforms.

Never thought I would see the day.

SlabMan
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Case study

I'd love to seem some stats on the relative amounts of infrastructure pre- and post- move

Eddie Johnson
Badgers
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What's a User?

>handing supposedly 30 million users over

Is a user any dead or not-so-dead account that has been rotting away for 2 years or less? I would bet that less than 10% of the accounts are active. And somehow, in the transition, all but the most active will be purged.

I'd also argue that Acounts/Users > 1. I know it's not the same but this reminds me of the free web hosting sites where you'd 'homestead' 5 or 6 accounts to increase your storage and bandwidth allocations. I wonder if whoever bought out Tripod still counts me as a user? Or 6?

Mahatma Coat
Happy

Hell freezes over?

Microsoft endorses an open source competitor. Where's the catch?

CD001

Maybe...

... just maybe ... the fines, anti-trust suits, Vista, RRoD and all the myriad other problems MS have faced are finally hitting their bottom line slightly. They've even made redundancies recently IIRC.

It could be that MS are actually going to channel effort into the things they're good at; marketing a so-so operating system and office applications. If we're lucky they might actually get the last niggles out of Windows 7 (which, to be fair, isn't a bad OS), tighten up on security and you never know, IE9 might even be usable!

Nearly all of Microsoft's forays outside of their core competencies have bombed, badly, the one exception being the XBoX - which, I believe, is now profitable - so maybe they're they're realising that it might be time to focus on their core lines for a bit, until times are easier again at least. When they've got cash to burn again they can return to their bad old ways.

Charlie van Becelaere
Gates Horns

As much as anything

Microsoft are just sending their "customers" to someone who is not Google.

That is all, nothing to see here, move right along, please.

YumDogfood

The great purge?

Somebody, somewhere within MS, has a clue - and the power to act. Moving the users over to Wordpress was a smart move designed to minimize negative publicity (instead of just dropping them on their asses). Dumping non-core developments signals that another direction is being taken.

I expect the old wolf to don an all new sparkly sheepskin soon, watch for product announcements.

Playing devils advocate, MS could just be tearing lumps out of itself as it lithobrakes into the deck at high speed.

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