Microsoft Pinpoint

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

~ the last words ~

In May 2010 Pinpoint carried more than 7,000 application listings from more than 30,000 independent software vendors, and almost none of that inventory was meant to be browsed the way you browse a store. Microsoft launched it in the United States in 2008 as the replacement for something called Solution Finder, and the job was the same. You had a problem that needed a SharePoint deployment or a Dynamics implementation, and the site handed you a list of companies certified to take your money.

The rollout went wide fast. Four national sites opened in 2009, starting with the United Kingdom and India. By July 2010 the list had grown past a dozen countries, with Canada running in both of its languages and a whole row of Latin American editions added at once. Microsoft said at the time it intended to reach most major markets by the end of that year. A directory is cheap to clone once the partner data already exists in a database somewhere, and the partner data existed.

What it never solved was the thing directories always fail at, which is being found. The 2014 relaunch made the problem worse, and a Microsoft spokesperson later conceded to the trade press that the redesign was not search engine optimized. A partner listing that Google cannot see is a business card in a drawer.

~ the record ~

~ the supply side ~

Pinpoint is a product I could only ever have met from the wrong end. The Microsoft Certified Partner badge was visible in Turkey the whole time. It sat on the sites of Ankara and Istanbul software houses and in the tender documents those houses wrote, and the badge was the marketing. Pinpoint was the database the badge was supposed to point at, and that list of national editions from July 2010 does not include Turkey.

So the shape of it here was a certification with no local directory behind it, which is an ordinary thing in a channel business and a strange thing for a product whose entire purpose was to be the place buyers looked. An engineer sits on the supply side of a partner directory anyway. You are the thing being listed, and the listing is somebody in sales filling out a form once a year.

~ 7 July 2016 ~

Microsoft announced the retirement at its 2016 partner conference and the switch happened on 7 July, when the customer-facing Pinpoint was replaced by a Find a Partner section inside Partner Center. The difference mattered more than the branding: Pinpoint was built as a marketplace with listings and customer reviews, and Partner Center was built as a referral engine. The reviews did not survive the move. Partners were told to copy them out before 30 June and most did not hear about it in time.

By September 2016 the archive shows pinpoint.microsoft.com forwarding to partnercenter.microsoft.com, and it was still doing that at the end of 2017, when Wikipedia records the final shutdown. Type the address today and Microsoft sends you to its Solution Providers page, which does the same job under the fourth name it has had in twenty years.

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