Microsoft gets off its soapbox
Microsoft is to close its video sharing service Soapbox by the end of next month. If you’d never heard of the site, it seems you’re not alone.
The service began in 2006 and was housed at the MSN portal. However, it struggled to compete with rivals, particularly as it launched around the same time as Google bought out YouTube.
As well as failing to build a successful brand name, the site had little to offer that was unavailable with other services. About the only advantage it had over YouTube was that users could continue watching clips while uploading their own videos.
At the time of writing, all but two of the 30 most popular clips on the site were uploaded by people using language other than English. While that could mean it was more successful in other countries, it’s more likely the site simply failed to attract English speakers away from YouTube.
Whatever its technical or marketing failures, Soapbox was also almost certainly a victim of Microsoft being stricter on proactively removing clips that had been uploaded without copyright than YouTube.
The firm had already decided to scale back the site last month, with a tentative plan to concentrate on gathering clips which were specifically relevant to the main categories of the MSN portal. It’s now decided on a total closure with no new clips accepted after July 29 and the site shutting down completely on August 31.
Soapbox isn’t far from the first Microsoft service to fall prey to a more successful rival. Earlier this year it finally abandoned its Encarta encyclopedia after acknowledging it had become redundant in the Wikipedia age.
It’s also recently dropped the Microsoft Money personal finance package, though in that case there was no obvious rival taking business away and it was more a case of demand for the product dropping off.
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