Microsoft Channel 9

» see channel9.msdn.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

channel 9 was free and public and open to anybody with a connection, which normally leaves me without an excuse. the excuse here is that it was made for people writing c# against windows and i have never been one of those people. my stack went the other way early and stayed there.

it launched on 5 april 2004 out of a small group inside microsoft led by lenn pryor, with jeff sandquist among the people who built it. the context matters. microsoft's standing with developers in 2004 was near the bottom, the antitrust years were recent, internet explorer 6 was rotting in place, and the company's public voice was press releases. channel 9's proposal was that the second problem could be fixed by removing the press release.

so the format was one person with a handheld camera walking down a hallway in redmond and letting whichever engineer they found talk. no script and nothing much in the way of cuts. bill gates sat for it. so did mark russinovich and erik meijer. the videos were long and badly lit, and full of the kind of detail nobody would have cleared for a marketing page.

there is a second thing going on underneath, which is that attending a professional developers conference costs a fortune and channel 9 cost microsoft almost nothing. a camera and somebody willing to hold it. whatever the internal accounting was, the effect for anyone outside the united states was that redmond's hallway conversations became a download, whether or not you were writing the code they were about.

~ the case file ~

~ the name ~

channel 9 is the audio channel on united airlines flights that pipes the cockpit radio into the headphones at your seat. the pilots are not talking to you. you are just allowed to listen. that is a precise description of what the site was trying to be, and as a statement of editorial policy it beats most of what media companies manage to write down.

~ what it published ~

the early years had more than video on them. there were discussion forums and a wiki running on flexwiki, and what came out of those went back to the product teams. the internet explorer team was one of them, at a point when that team badly needed to hear from somebody outside the building.

that side faded out. by the end channel 9 was employee-produced video with no community contribution at all, which is a quieter way of saying the conversation had turned into a broadcast. the videos were still good, conference sessions and long technical series, mostly engineers explaining their own work. but the remarkable thing about 2004 was that microsoft was listening in public, and that part stopped years before the site did.

~ how it ended ~

microsoft announced the merge on 5 november 2021. channel 9 was going into microsoft learn, the company's consolidated documentation and training site, and most content uploaded after november 2017 would move across with it. older material would be judged on whether it was notable enough to carry, which is not a promise. the site itself stopped answering overnight on 18 november, and microsoft called the move complete on 1 december.

the archive is the sore point. seventeen years of video, and the migration criteria drew a line at 2017, which means the first thirteen years are the part with discretion applied to it. archive team crawled what it could reach before the lights went out. what you can still watch on microsoft learn is real and it is a fraction. the interviews from the years when the company was learning how to talk to people are the ones with the weakest guarantee behind them.

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