Microsoft's Chocolate Soup Social Software
Microsoft killed Spaces because it's forgotten how to do what it once did best: copy and extend.
There are a lot of copycats in the tech world. A lot of people steal things from each other, often blatantly. You have to wonder how Facebook, Twitter, and other big products manage to avoid this. I mean, how hard would it have been for Google, Microsoft, or IBM to rip off Facebook when it first appeared—or when it was growing like crazy? It baffles me.
This sort of failure began with blogging. Blogger and a few other systems emerged with a simple mechanism that would have been incredibly simple to copy. To an extent, the only company that took the hint was Wordpress, which stems directly from the early blogging concepts. Everyone else had to do it their own way, with many eschewing the simple yet powerful mechanisms established by Blogger.com. Eventually Google, a company loaded with coders, bought the service. That was laughable. Are you telling me that iGoogle could not have been written from scratch over a weekend?
I suppose that Google wanted the customers more than the code. At this point, no one can afford Facebook's customers. You'd think someone would have produced an exact clone by now. One company really comes to mind: Microsoft. When the blogging phenomenon was heating up, Microsoft was again behind the curve. It tried to rebound with Microsoft Live Spaces. This week, the company threw in the towel. Now it's asking customers to go to Wordpress.
Spaces arrived in 2004, years after the blogging phenomenon was established. And like many of Microsoft's online products, it missed the point. I'm not sure if the company has meetings trying to deconstruct the world outside of the Redmond compound, but it seems to be clueless. Microsoft's ideas about blogging are off-the-mark to this day. For some reason, there seems to be the impression that it's only about social networking and not about professional presentation and modern content management. In short, the entire MS interpretation is wrong.
Microsoft has become a culture of yes men and toadies who are apparently afraid to say anything. There are hundreds of serious bloggers at the company who could straighten them out in a minute, if anyone would listen.You have to assume this was tried and failed.
Which brings us to Facebook. Apparently not one person at Microsoft as the ability to say, "hey, this is popular. Let's copy it!" like in the old days. Not that I'm encouraging or liked the fact that Microsoft was derivative in the past, but let's face it, its best work was derivative. Now it has evolved into a NIH (not invented here)-type company that cannot accept the fact that anyone outside the gates has a brain. Instead, it does a deal with Facebook to sell ads. When did selling ads become a core competency at Microsoft, anyway?
It baffles me me to this day that the dominant software company in the world that makes money hand-over-fist with high margin software, decides that it wants to sell ads instead. I'm reminded of the old Monty Python bit where the bookkeeper suddenly decides he wants to become a lion tamer. A company that dominates its market—a company that practically invented the market—this company wants to sell ads instead.
Microsoft has a screw loose. This dingbat nature has to be the reason the company can't figure out this social media stuff. There's no attempt to do much more than to sit on Microsoft Spaces and fool around selling ads. What happened to the olden days when a company like Facebook would have feared Microsoft? Redmond would have taken on Second Life, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and dozens of other large software-based services with its now moribund "embrace and extend" policy.
The fact is, however, that the company can't embrace what it can't understand. Instead, the folks there look at something and say, "geez, that sucks. They're doing it all wrong," and then go off in the wrong direction because it didn't understand the basis of the idea. It's like making chocolate soup for someone because they told you they like chocolate and they like soup. Microsoft has been making a lot of chocolate soup of late.