Microsoft Responds to the Evolution of Online Communities
in [Virtual PC]
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From: nntp on 4 May 2010 17:51 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.
From: Bo Berglund on 6 May 2010 01:14 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. -- Bo Berglund (Sweden)
From: Karl E. Peterson on 6 May 2010 18:59 Bo Berglund wrote: > Complete and utter nonsense! > All of the cited advantages of web forums are in actual fact > disadvantages! War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. > The only reason for web forums is to be able to show ads > everywhere.... Bingo! Not to mention the ability to "filter" <ahem> undesirable content. A subject (content Microsoft considers undesirable) that I've had a bit of experience with over the years. > 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. Yes, and your point is? :-| -- ..NET: It's About Trust! http://vfred.mvps.org
From: Bo Berglund on 7 May 2010 10:39 On Thu, 06 May 2010 15:59:17 -0700, Karl E. Peterson <karl(a)exmvps.org> wrote: >> 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. > >Yes, and your point is? :-| My point is that the newsgroups serve as a quick and very easy to navigate means to ask technical questions and get replies back. In a newsgroup it is also very easy to read ongoing threads to follow discussions and learn new things. With news you can download a lot of messages and then scan hrough them very quickly. Contrast this with the extremely slow and cumbersome way to use the web based forums which have next to no way to see threads and jump quickly between them and also no simple way to download the contents for off-line reading. So it makes me very sad that Microsoft is abandoning (closing down) the newsgroups in favour of the web forums. :-( Obviously I am not looking for visual "experience" or such, I am simply looking for the facts and answers in as quick a way as possible. -- Bo Berglund (Sweden)
From: Karl E. Peterson on 10 May 2010 13:38
Bo Berglund wrote: > Karl E. Peterson <karl(a)exmvps.org> wrote: > >>> 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. >> >> Yes, and your point is? :-| > > My point is that the newsgroups serve as a quick and very easy to > navigate means to ask technical questions and get replies back. > In a newsgroup it is also very easy to read ongoing threads to follow > discussions and learn new things. > With news you can download a lot of messages and then scan hrough them > very quickly. > > Contrast this with the extremely slow and cumbersome way to use the > web based forums which have next to no way to see threads and jump > quickly between them and also no simple way to download the contents > for off-line reading. > > So it makes me very sad that Microsoft is abandoning (closing down) > the newsgroups in favour of the web forums. :-( > > Obviously I am not looking for visual "experience" or such, I am > simply looking for the facts and answers in as quick a way as > possible. <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. -- ..NET: It's About Trust! http://vfred.mvps.org |