The Other Shoe Drops

If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll be aware that I recently moved across to hosting it on Blogger after more than five years of it being hosted on Microsoft’s Windows Live Spaces.

I made the move in June when Microsoft started removing features of the Spaces service. Despite a chorus of complaints from users, Microsoft would not come clean about their plans for the service. Indeed, they denied that anything was amiss. Nevertheless, I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop, and today it did.

Microsoft have announced that they are pulling the plug on Windows Live Spaces. They have at least tried to sugar the pill by offering existing users the chance to migrate their blogs over to being hosted on WordPress.com, but the Microsoft gadgets that people used to customise the look and feel of their blogs are no more. So it’s not a full migration, just a migration of the core blog entries and nothing else.

Although I had set up an account on WordPress.com in June as a trial, I finally decided to move to Blogger, because there I was able to use Javascript in widgets and blog entries. WordPress.com, like Windows Live Spaces, does not allow the use of Javascript. That meant that I could not embed my Photosynths in my posts, or use the LibraryThing widget to display a rolling selection of books from my library on my blog.

I’ve decided to stick with hosting my blog on Blogger, but I have migrated the content of my old blog from Windows Live Spaces to WordPress.com in order to preserve it once Microsoft wipe out Spaces. That content can be found at Geoff Coupe’s (Old) Blog.

So what can we learn from all of this? Well, it seems to me that Microsoft’s customer relations in this instance have clearly followed the mushroom model; i.e. keep your customers in the dark and throw shit on them. Not a good way to deal with your customers I would have thought. This debacle has certainly left a bad impression on me.

Update: Cough, after a couple of months, I left Blogger and moved back to WordPress