Microsoft shutters YouTube clone Last month, Microsoft said it would "significantly scale back" its YouTube-mimicking Soapbox service. And now, true to its word, Redmond has scaled the service back so significantly, it will soon cease to exist. As first reported by CNET News, Microsoft is completely closing the video-sharing site on August 31. Beginning on …
Microsoft has always been a pretty financially stable company that's very adept at making money, why would they even bother with something like this? Google spent a metric fuckload of money on YouTube and it's given them nothing but headaches. If it weren't for the pirated music videos it isn't likely YouTube would see 1/100th the traffic it gets and at an average of 7MB per video it doesn't seem possible to sell enough ads to recoup that bandwidth. Is it just a case of Web me 2.0?
Who'd of thought that if you take the two most expensive comodities in IT (storage and bandwidth) and make a free service out of them that it won't make any money. It's only a matter of time before Google have to come clean about the amount of cash that you-tube is costing and close it down or make some pretty major changes.
Make no mistake - Google banging on about how the rights owners are bleeding them dry is to try to cover up that they can't hope to afford the licences that all other broadcasters have to pay.
I think that this is a mature decision by MS, to admit that it costs too much and not to compete with Google. I'd far rather be an MS than a Google shareholder based on this decision.
"We encourage any Soapbox user that wants to keep their videos to download them off of Soapbox prior to August 31.," Microsoft says. "We will be communicating to our valued Soapbox community..."
Valued?
They tried the social networking Facebook idea on Hotmail much to my ignoring.
Q. why would they even bother with something like this?
A. Because they are racing towards the end of their constant-software-upgrade-cycle gravy train. This has worked for years because they have owned enough of the software market to make it awkward for users to jump off. In the past if you didn't use windows you didn't get IE. If you didn't get IE you could not access a lot of IE optimised websites. There whole organisation is based on lock in. If they can lock users into a flawed product they can sell it over and over again as 'new and improved' versions are released and use the huge revenue generated to buy the market and keep the lock in.
This cycle is ending, the whole house of cards is beginning to fall. Comoditisation is reducing margins, 'new features' are looking more and more like bells an whistles. 'Improvements' are becoming more and more specialised. Business upgrade cycles are getting longer. Home users are turning to web based fun that does not require new hardware. Even gamers, the real power users of the home market, are finding that the cost of keeping up with PC games required hardware is too costly with too little gain and turning to platforms. Users are staying away in droves, Microsoft is staring into the abyss.
That is why they will make a me-too version of anything and everything in a vain attempt to find something they can make a profit on in the coming decade. If win8 bombs like Vista, which it probably will as it is an answer looking for a question, look for a radically different Microsoft when Window 9 is released.
"We will be communicating to our valued Soapbox community using several different methods to ensure that people are able to keep any video that is important to them"
How valued is this community exactly? "We value your contribution, now kindly take your videos off our servers, bugger off and switch the lights off when you leave - thank you please"
well it's slightly different;. Google Video actually launched before YouTube. Google knew why they wanted a video sharing site, but it just so happened that another site gained more traction, so they bought them. I genuinely believe that Microsoft has no idea why it wants to do a lot of the things it does, other than feeling the "need" to compete.
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