Dan Shafer calls us "nimrods" for turning off his IM client. Well, the way I look at it is we're still a business. Our bandwidth costs us money. Our servers, and their upkeep, costs us money. My salary costs Microsoft money. Our shareholders demand that we return a profit (so much so that one shareholder recently asked us to stop giving money to charity -- I'll come back to that in a minute).
Plus, we're making our service more secure and it does more now than it ever did before and now we'd like to start selling our IM infrastructure to third parties. Seems to me that's fair. Dan, do you work for free? How about you send me your latest books for free? Or, even better yet, what would your publisher say if I went to Borders, bought a book of yours, then retyped it and put it onto the Internet for all my readers to use for free?
As to charity, one of our shareholders wants us to be forbidden to spend any money on charity. That's just plain bad business. Why? Because it makes me feel good as a Microsoft employee that Microsoft is one of the world's largest charitable givers -- it's a major reason that Microsoft has one of industry's lowest turnover rates. It also improves our brand's reputation (which does need all the help it can get). It also lets us invest in growing areas like education that can't afford the latest technology. That lets us learn best practices that we can incorporate into our products.
[The Scobleizer Weblog]
No you're nimrods.
You're trying to defend cutting off the oxygen to vendor neutral IM. I'd think the same if I found that my next Outlook upgrade suddenly meant I could only email other Outlook users.
I'll be boycotting MSN from October until a work-around is found. Of course you could save me this bother and just make your damn software interoperable!
Whose the nimrod now?