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Microsoft has made a lot of changes in their web services in the recent years. They have done so either by restoring or renaming them. As far as restoring is concerned, its somehow fine but renaming the services is a pathetic thing to do. I mean if you’re marketing such a service which is not up to the mark then what you should do is concentrate on improving the service instead of just renaming it. You should have something good to promote and if its not good then it’ll result in the failure just like it happened with the Microsoft web services. A number of Microsoft services have come to an end which includes Windows Live for TV, Windows Live Expo, Live Search Books and Live Search Academic. This certainly shows which direction they are heading towards.

Windows Live for TV was supposed to be a plugin for Windows Live Spaces/Messenger. A plugin which could have incorporated some enhanced features like chat and voice conversations, PC to PC calls and remote access to Windows Live Spaces all through your TV. If they could have achieved their targets, it would be such a big thing but unluckily they never got out from beta stage. The service which started in January last year is said to go down on June 24, 2008.

A program manager was quoted saying:

The project was moved to a different organization internally in the spring of last year and will most likely not come out of beta.

Windows Live Expo was more like the Craigslist for Microsoft. It is also set to join the list of failed services. The service couldn’t compete with the market, thats why they’re going down. If you log on to the Windows Live Expo page, you’ll see the following message:

Windows Live Expo will discontinue service on 31 July 2008. In preparation, the following features are no longer available:
Create new account.
Post a new listing.
Extend a listing.
Upgrade a listing to a premium listing.

Live Search Books and Academic were said to be a search engine for books and scholarly literature but it also went down. Live Search Books remained available from December 2006 till June 2008 where as Live Search Academic remained accessible from April 2006 to June 2008.

It seems that Microsoft is concentrating more on quantity rather than the quality. This is visible from the fact that they have released a wide range of new services along with branding the old ones with the “Live� image. The result is in front you, those services were to good to compete. If you wana do good online, you need to have a strong product/web service, the one which should look promising to users and attract them. The way Microsoft is performing in online services right now, it seems that they are going to discontinue more services. All we have to see now is which service to go down first. Lets hope that this won’t be the case.