Microsoft Classroom

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

~ the obituary ~

I missed this one on a technicality that is hard to argue with. You had to be a school. Microsoft Classroom only existed inside an Office 365 Education tenant, which meant an administrator somewhere had to switch it on for a domain belonging to an institution, and there was no consumer door to knock on. Nobody signed up for this the way you sign up for a website.

It arrived on 14 April 2016 and the job was ordinary. A teacher created a class, put an assignment in it with a due date, and the students got one page listing everything they owed and when. Underneath it was Office 365 Groups doing the membership and OneNote Class Notebook doing the paper, so most of the parts already existed and Classroom was the lid on top of them.

The thing it was built against was Google Classroom, which had shipped in August 2014 and was already winning schools by riding in on cheap Chromebooks. Microsoft was late, and the response was not unreasonable: give the education tenants a free hub that used the Office tools they were already licensed for.

Then Microsoft changed its mind about which product was the hub. Teams for Education showed up in January 2017 with assignments and the class notebook inside it. The retirement of Classroom was announced on 18 May 2017, teachers lost the ability to create anything new on 31 July 2017, and the whole thing was finished on 31 January 2018. It had been alive for twenty-one months and in preview for all of them.

~ the case file ~

~ twenty-one months ~

The lifespan is the interesting number. Nine months after Classroom shipped, Microsoft announced the product that would replace it, which means the decision to kill it was taken while the thing was still being rolled out to schools. Somewhere in Redmond two teams were shipping the same feature set and one of them was going to lose.

Teams won because Teams was not an education product. It was the chat and meeting surface Microsoft intended to point at every customer it had, and once that was true a separate hub for classrooms became a maintenance cost with no strategic argument behind it. Classroom was not beaten by Google Classroom. It was beaten by a bigger internal roadmap.

~ the tenant admin's problem ~

A school year is not a product cycle. Teachers set up their classes in August and expect the arrangement to survive until June, and the retirement schedule cut straight across that: assignments frozen at the end of July 2017, everything gone at the end of January 2018, which lands in the middle of a term almost everywhere.

This is the cost that nobody counts when a platform consolidates. The administrator who had spent a year getting staff onto Classroom got to spend the next year getting the same staff onto Teams, and the second migration is always harder than the first because the goodwill is gone. A fair number of those schools took the opportunity to look at Google instead.

~ what survived the move ~

Almost everything, which is what makes it a clean retirement rather than a demolition. Assignments carried over to Teams and so did the class notebook, and the classes themselves were Office 365 Groups all along, so the underlying objects did not need to be recreated. Microsoft was explicit about wanting the best of Classroom to end up inside Teams.

What did not survive was the idea that education deserved its own front door. Classroom was a small focused thing that did one job for one kind of user. Teams is a general-purpose surface with an education skin, and every teacher using it today is working inside an interface designed first for people running a sales meeting.

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