Microsoft Responds to the Evolution of Online Communities
in [Virtual PC]
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From: VanguardLH on 11 May 2010 00:59 Bo Berglund wrote: > On Tue, 04 May 2010 14:51:00 -0700 (UTC), nntp(a)microsoft.com wrote: > >>Date 5/4/2010 >>Starting in early summer 2010, Microsoft will begin progressively closing down the Microsoft public newsgroups to enrich conversations in the rapidly-growing forum platform. This decision is in response to worldwide market trends and evolving customer needs. >> >>Microsoft continues to invest in forums to reduce customer effort, consolidate community venues and make it easier for active contributors to retain their influence. Forums provide a healthy community environment with less spam and make answers easier to find by customers and search engines. Additionally, forums offer a better user and off-topic management platform that will improve customer satisfaction by facilitating discussions in a clean space. >> >>We understand that some newsgroups are still active, and important to the community. In the coming days and weeks, we will be rolling out tools and resources to minimize disruption to the community discussions. >> >>We are working diligently on providing additional resources and information in local languages later this week. In the meantime, please refer to the official Microsoft Newsgroup website http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/default.mspx concerning this issue. The Microsoft Newsgroup website will be made available in additional languages in the next few days. > > Complete and utter nonsense! > All of the cited advantages of web forums are in actual fact > disadvantages! > The only reason for web forums is to be able to show ads > everywhere.... > For the user experience forums are slow, hard to navigate, give no > overview and cannot be handled off-line. They are a waste of time. Even worse is that Microsoft has yet to create a forum for VirtualPC. When a user asked about VirtualPC in the "Where is the Forum For ...?" forum, they were told: Probably the best place to ask this is in the Virtual PC newsgroup - http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/list/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.virtualpc No longer a valid response. Microsoft is dropping their NNTP "newsgroups" of which one was the microsoft.public.virtualpc newsgroup/community. On that web page mentioned for the newsgroup, click on "Communities Home". Then click on the "Newsgroups" link which takes you to http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/default.mspx. Notice what Microsoft is declaring regarding their discontinuance of support for newsgroups (same stuff they posted here). The last version of Exchange that supported NNTP was 2003 and mainstream support for it ended which gave Microsoft an excuse to stop providing NNTP-like newsgroups. Now go to either http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/categories or http://www.microsoft.com/communities/forums/default.mspx (which the "More Microsoft Forums" takes you to the first link). Notice there are *no* forums listed for VirtualPC. You're screwed after Microsoft yanks their NNTP newsgroups if they don't create and migrate to a forum dedicated to VirtualPC. When this newsgroup is gone, it may disappear (unless carried by other NNTP servers) unless Microsoft gets their butts in gear to create a replacement forum for it.
From: Mark Rae [MVP] on 13 May 2010 09:12
"Karl E. Peterson" <karl(a)exmvps.org> wrote in message news:uoD2teG8KHA.1760(a)TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl... >> So it makes me very sad that Microsoft is abandoning (closing down) >> the newsgroups in favour of the web forums. :-( > <AOL> to all of that. It's an *abysmal* decision which, given the > company's track record, was probably to be expected. Microsoft was > already in strong contention for the MOST ANTI-CUSTOMER company on the > planet. This move just serves to further solidify their lead. Hear! Hear! -- Mark Rae ASP.NET MVP http://www.markrae.net |