Docs.com

» see docs.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i was precisely the person microsoft built docs.com for and i have no memory of it whatsoever. an engineer with office files open all day, working through every year it existed. it ran for seven years across two completely unrelated products and never once turned up in front of me, which is its own kind of verdict on a service.

the address is worth taking first, because docs.com is a very good domain and microsoft owned it outright. type it into a browser today and you get bounced to learn.microsoft.com, which is the documentation site i genuinely do use several times a week. the name outlived the product by nearly a decade and now points at something with no relationship to it at all.

the first version arrived on 21 april 2010, announced from the stage at facebook's f8 developer conference. it was a collaboration between microsoft fuse labs and facebook, presented by mark zuckerberg alongside lili cheng. the idea was that you could create and share office documents with your facebook friends without either side buying anything.

that made more sense in 2010 than it reads now. google docs was three years old and winning the argument, and office web apps had not shipped yet, so microsoft had no browser word of its own to point at. facebook had five hundred million users and looked like the place software would be distributed from for the next twenty years. both of those readings were reasonable in april 2010 and both had expired within about two.

~ the record ~

~ the second one ~

in 2015 microsoft rebuilt docs.com into something else entirely and kept the name. the new version was about publishing rather than collaborating. you uploaded a word file or a pdf, and it got a public page anybody could read in a browser without an account or a download. powerpoint and sway files worked the same way.

readers could comment and could take a copy. what they could not do was edit alongside you, which is the feature that would have made it a competitor to anything. a separate microsoft experiment called curah!, a link-curation tool, was folded into it around the same time. the product was, in effect, slideshare for office files, built by a company that would shortly buy slideshare.

~ the documents nobody meant to publish ~

in march 2017 the security researcher kevin beaumont pointed the site's own search box at ordinary words and found what people had put there. passwords sat in uploaded spreadsheets. bank details and personal records sat in uploaded documents, all of them fully indexed and public, because the users had understood upload to mean store rather than broadcast.

microsoft turned the search feature off while it worked out what to do. the underlying problem was never technical. every file was doing exactly what the product had been designed to do, which was the whole trouble.

~ what the address does now ~

the closure notice went up on 9 june 2017 and the schedule was unusually orderly for a microsoft wind-down. new account registrations stopped that day. a migration tool for office 365 work and school accounts appeared on 19 june. from 1 august nobody could publish or edit anything further, and on 15 december the site and everything on it became unreachable.

microsoft pointed everyone at slideshare and onedrive. the reasoning was hard to argue with, since linkedin had come with slideshare attached and running two publishing surfaces for the same file types made no sense. there is a coda: linkedin sold slideshare to scribd in 2020, so the service docs.com was killed for left the company three years later. the domain is still there, still working, still handing people off to the documentation.

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