My Digital Life

A few months ago MS announced that it was going to cut off the DRM servers that support the old MSN Music service, effectively limiting what people could do with the music they had paid for. 

It turns out that they’ve now changed their mind and decided to keep the servers going until 2011… so all the bad press was for nothing.  I seem to remember saying at the time that it was crazy!

As Joe Wilcox says over on Microsoft Watch, it would have been easy for MS to turn this in to a PR win.  Why not give the people who were effected credit on Zune Marketplace?  MS do know how to do customer service when they need to but it just doesn’t seem as pervasive as it should be.  It’s a shame.

As you might have spotted, due to the work I’m doing at the moment I keep a pretty close eye on Microsoft and what its doing.  Over the past week or so I think thing they’ve had a fairly good week, news about the Live Mesh platform has started to arrive and it looks great, most of the comment I’ve read about it has been very positive.

So why go and do this?  ‘Microsoft to nuke MSN Music DRM keys‘. It looks like MS are decommissioning the infrastructure that support the DRM used for music bought on the old MSN Music site.  What genius made that decision?  How expensive can it be to keep those servers running?  Surely they’re never going to get busier or require scaling now MSN Music is gone.  Given all the free storage and hosting MS is throwing about chopping off this service can’t really improve the bottom line can it?  All this will do is generate bad press and piss people off… it seems crazy.  Oh well.