Summary: Soapbox to close after inability to take off

Tomorrow will be a big day for Microsoft (not in the positive sense [1, 2, 3]) and there are already more signs of reductions.

One potential vector of Silverlight inflammation (Soapbox) has just been eliminated, just as earlier signs suggested.

Microsoft's Soapbox Headed For The Wastebin

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So it makes sense that Erik Jorgensen, MSN's corporate vice president and chief media and technology officer, told Ina Fried and Stephen Shankland, "We have decided to shut down the Soapbox feature. Beginning today, July 21, we will be notifying both our customers and our internal and external partners that on July 29th, people will no longer be able to upload videos to Soapbox and on August 31st, the service will no longer be available."

The funny thing is that even Microsoft uses YouTube (and Flash). In fact, Microsoft uses YouTube for viral marketing and one of the latest examples is this one, which got pulled.

Microsoft Removes Projectile-vomiting IE8 Ad From Web

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An online ad for Internet Explorer 8 that showed a woman projectile vomiting has left such a bad taste in viewers' mouths that Microsoft has decided to remove it.

Maybe it was just part of the publicity stunt because it received great exposure.

Speaking of Internet Explorer, try going to http://research.microsoft.com/ and see how nothing shows up (Firefox in GNU/Linux). A reader says to us: "On Firefox I clicked on http://research.microsoft.com/ and it prompted me to install Silverlight. I closed the link and started it up in iExplorer and now research.microsoft.com won't respond. Is Microsoft being clever with non iexplorer users?" The Web was built on standards and it should stay that way. Videos needn't be proprietary, either. ⬆