Microsoft takes hatchet to YouTube clone Microsoft plans to "significantly scale back" its Soapbox service, the would-be YouTube challenger it launched in 2006. Whatever that means. Speaking with Cnet, Microsoft vice president Erik Jorgensen said that Soapbox's YouTube-like user-generated video setup is just too expensive considering the state of the economy. But he …
loss is immaterial to Google. I don't think money-grubbing M$ could stomach a business model like that.
Google knows the way to the future. I would have invested the money in old-fashioned things like real-estate and widget factories. No! 6 Billion people having their own TV channel is what makes money.
I might have used it if they called it something more 2.0 like.. Wang or Dild. Or Flangr.
Who'd have thought a crappy, derivative web 2.0 fluff site would fail against a pre-established, well known rival?
Compete with rival for profit in a service that isn't even breaking even for them and will cost you development, maintenance and hosting. Recipe for fail. I'd rather have a cheaper Windows thanks, but feel free to wank away your money.
Oh, they mean MSN video!
The only reason they get so many hits is because every time someone opens up MSN messenger (sorry, Windows Live messenger), it displays an ad popup containing videos from the site and some adverts. I've clicked on few out of general interest but I would be ashamed to count myself as a Soapbox subscriber.
I dimly remember the name now you mention it. It seems like a case of MS leading the pack, here. I cant imagine that youtube will hang around for that much longer without some pretty major changes - those changes may happen slowly, without fanfare, but they'll happen. You just need to look at the music videos debacle in the UK and Germany (?) which youtube/Google have managed to make into "the man wanted too much money" rather than a "we can't pay the musicians for their work cuz we're skint" to see that things are changing.
It doesn't take a genius to see that taking the two major expenses in IT, namely bandwidth and storage and turning them into a free service is going to cost money hand over fist.
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