Microsoft bCentral

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

~ the goodbye ~

bCentral sold to people who owned a small business. In 1999 I was fifteen and owned a modem, so I was never the customer, but I was very much the collateral. Two of the services Microsoft poured into this thing were products the hobbyist web actually ran on, and bCentral is the address where both of them were taken to be turned into a line item.

Microsoft bought LinkExchange in November 1998 for 265 million dollars. LinkExchange was a banner-trading cooperative founded by Tony Hsieh and Sanjay Madan, and it came with ListBot, a free mailing list service that by January 2000 was sending mail to more than twenty million subscribers on behalf of half a million individuals and small companies. Microsoft launched bCentral in September 1999 as the container for all of it, expanded the pitch in a formal relaunch of the web services in September 2000, and sold the bundle as everything a small business needed to be online: a site, hosting, a directory listing, email marketing, banner reach.

On paper it worked. bCentral reached roughly two million registered users worldwide, which is a real number for a business product in 2003. Neither of the services it was built around lasted as long as the brand did.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it swallowed ~

ListBot went first. Microsoft shut it in August 2001 in favor of ListBuilder, a bCentral product at 149 dollars a year, and the stated reasoning was that ListBot served hobbyists rather than small businesses. That was accurate and it was also the entire explanation for the twenty million subscribers. The people being migrated ran pages about their bands. Their mailing list went from free to 149 dollars in a single email.

LinkExchange lasted longer and ended smaller. New signups closed on 15 November 2006 and banner serving stopped on 4 June 2007, years after bCentral itself was dead, the product outliving the storefront it had been filed under. At the time of the 1998 acquisition the network had carried banners for something like 400,000 member sites.

~ the wind-down ~

Microsoft announced on 23 March 2004 that bCentral would be replaced by Microsoft Small Business Center, and the replacement was mostly an information site rather than a hosting and marketing suite. The phase-out went country by country: the UK, Canada, Australia and Japan starting that month, then France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the US in the second half of the year, with the target of 40 countries by mid-2005. killedbymicrosoft dates the close at June 2004, which is about right for the center of gravity of a rollout that had no single switch-off day.

The bcentral.com domain no longer resolves. Microsoft kept trying at this market for another decade, through Office Live Small Business and its successors, and never found the version that stuck. The thing bCentral proved is narrower and more useful than it looks: Microsoft could buy the most popular free service on the small web and could not work out how to keep it free, so it charged for it, and the people who made it popular left.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »