Cybozu Live

» see live.cybozu.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Cybozu's own word for it was a second groupware. The first one is whatever your employer makes you use. The second is for the group you belong to after you clock out, and when Cybozu Live closed the company listed those groups by type in its own notice: the PTAs and the doujin circles, the universities and the NPOs. It cost nothing, and it was aimed at people coordinating something nobody was paying them to coordinate.

It opened on 26 November 2009 as an invite-only beta with a ceiling of twenty people to a group. Open registration arrived on 25 October 2010, the date Cybozu's own product page still gives as the release, and the ceiling went to a hundred. Two hundred by December 2012. Cybozu announced half a million registered users in May 2013 and a million in October 2014, and by August 2017 there were two million.

On 24 October 2017 Cybozu announced it would close. The notice led with the code rather than with strategy: the system had aged to the point where keeping it running stably would mean a fundamental rebuild and a large investment, and the paid cloud business needed that investment more. Then the sentence that settled it, which says that given limited resources the company should concentrate on its paid cloud services for now. For now is a peculiar thing to put in a notice announcing a permanent closure, and it is the wording the release actually uses.

I did not have this and neither did anybody I knew. A volunteer committee in Ankara in 2012 ran on a mailing list and a shared folder, and when nobody kept those up it moved to a WhatsApp group and stopped keeping records at all. What is odd about Cybozu Live from outside Japan is not that somebody built it. It is that a software company ran it free for nine years and treated a PTA as a customer worth the server bill.

~ the dossier ~

~ three hundred to a group ~

On 18 December 2013 Yahoo! JAPAN announced the closure of its own group service, a mailing list and message board product that is a different thing from the American Yahoo Groups and died six years before it. The reason Yahoo! JAPAN gave was that the system had aged past the point where keeping it running was practical. The next day, 19 December, Cybozu raised the free tier of Cybozu Live from two hundred people per group to three hundred, and put the Yahoo! announcement in writing as the reason.

Yahoo! JAPAN switched off on 28 May 2014, at three in the afternoon. Any group that fit under three hundred now had somewhere to land, and plenty of them landed here. Cybozu Live would be handed the same diagnosis four years later.

~ the word in the notice ~

The release of 24 October 2017 is a short document that does two things most shutdown notices do not. It apologizes by name to the developers who had built things on the Cybozu Live API, not only to the people using the product. And it hedges a permanent decision with one adverb. Between that notice and the end there were five hundred and thirty-eight days, and ASCII reported that Cybozu had deliberately picked the year after next rather than the next one.

What the notice does not do is offer anything. The closing FAQ says there is no preferential arrangement for existing Cybozu Live customers and no free service on offer. Export tools arrived in three waves across 2018, starting with rosters and boards in February and finishing with shared folders in June. A telephone desk opened on 10 January 2019. Cybozu never built a path from the free product into its own paid ones, and never named a date for deleting the data, saying only that deletion would follow some period after the end.

~ who built the doors out ~

Chatwork said it would build an importer on 25 October 2017, one day after the announcement. It shipped on 11 January 2019, three months before the lights went out, and it moved exactly one thing: the bulk export of your message boards. Attachments had to be downloaded and re-uploaded by hand. Every imported post carried the timestamp of the import rather than the moment it was written, so the archive came through with its chronology replaced.

Zoho Japan went at it harder. Its free migration tool opened on 24 October 2018, exactly one year after Cybozu's notice, under a headline calling the users what Zoho evidently thought they were: two million refugees. More than a thousand organizations and fifteen hundred groups had come through it by 24 January 2019. From 7 March, Zoho ran weekly migration workshops at its Yokohama office, ten seats a session, with most of the scheduled time set aside for attendees to sit and do the import themselves with somebody on hand to ask.

Cybozu Live closed at 23:59 on 15 April 2019. The companies that built the exits were the ones that wanted the traffic, which is how it had worked in 2013 as well, except that time Cybozu was the one holding the door open.

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