I have had a few people voice their displeasure with BetaNews' story regarding Microsoft's bug-ridden migration to Windows Live Spaces. Someone said we like "negative Microsoft articles." I couldn't disagree with this statement more. It's completely untrue.

 

The fact is, MS' move to Windows Live Spaces was pretty darn bad. In some cases, people were either locked out, or had some serious problems accessing the service for nearly a day. This is past unacceptable. While some pro-Microsoft folks said this it to be expected, in reality it is not. There are many other services who have millions of users that perform near-flawless upgrades on a regular basis. It seems that Microsoft has not mastered this yet.

 

Maybe the problem here is the Spaces crew is biting off more than it can chew. I find it hard to believe that some of the problems the service had were not detected in their test environments as the team says. How can such errors go undetected, and why for what i can remember for the second time the service has been seriously degraded for an extended period of time (maybe there is others, but I can remember one other serious outage other than this one.

 

It's issues like this which turn off people to new and exciting services. I'm by no means poo-pooing the potential of Windows Live.. but when you have some 50 million plus users with possibly a large portion of them getting their first exposure to Windows Live, having serious issues like this is a bad first impression.

 

This might also be a time for Microsoft to reconsider their rollout/migration strategy. To prevent problems like this in the future, why not migrate only a portion of users at random to the new format, and watch for issues? That way, an outage does not affect everyone, and you have a lot less pissed off people.

 

As for our negative articles, we've written unflattering stuff about just about every company, including AOL (which some people say we are unfairly biased positively for).

 

Ah yes. Journalism is so much fun. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.