Microsoft Soapbox

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

~ the last words ~

Soapbox was Microsoft's answer to YouTube, launched into a fight that had already been decided. The product started as an internal project codenamed Warhol in 2006, opened as a public beta in February 2007, and lived inside the MSN Video portal as the user-upload tab. To upload anything you needed a Windows Live ID. To play back you got Windows Media Player inside Internet Explorer, with a Flash fallback in other browsers. The interface was American English only.

YouTube was already serving over a billion video streams per day by the time Soapbox shipped. Microsoft's own numbers put Soapbox at under five percent of MSN Video's 480 million monthly streams, which were themselves a fraction of YouTube's daily traffic. On June 16 2009, Microsoft announced the shutdown and cited tough economic conditions. Uploads ended July 29, the player was pulled August 31, users had until that date to download anything they wanted to keep.

Soapbox never reached Turkey at meaningful scale. By 2007, YouTube was the default video tab on every browser i opened on TTNet at home and in every Ankara internet cafe i sat in. The idea that you would sign in with a Windows Live ID to upload to an MSN subpage instead was not a question anybody asked. Soapbox was a US-coded product, run in American English, behind a Microsoft login. It was the kind of product i learned about years later from a TechCrunch retrospective.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually was ~

Strip away the marketing and Soapbox was a video grid attached to a Windows Live login screen. Uploads, tags, comments, an RSS feed for channels you cared about. The one feature Microsoft kept pointing at was that you could keep browsing while your upload completed in the background, which YouTube did not yet do at launch. That detail did not move people. The reason people stayed on YouTube was that everybody else was already there, embedding YouTube URLs into MySpace pages and blog posts and email threads.

~ why it lost ~

Microsoft launched Soapbox with the wrong assumption: that the MSN portal still pulled meaningful new traffic in 2007. It did not. MSN was a default homepage on Internet Explorer installs, which meant most of its audience was inherited rather than chosen. YouTube was a destination people typed into the address bar on purpose. The video itself was just one part of the gap. The other part was that YouTube ran in every language and every browser without asking for an account, while Soapbox demanded Microsoft credentials in a single language to do anything beyond watching.

~ the legacy ~

Soapbox is now a footnote inside the MSN graveyard, listed next to MSN Groups and MSN TV and MSN Spaces. The lesson it represents is the one Microsoft kept relearning across that decade: shipping a feature copy of a category leader two years late, behind a Live ID, inside a portal nobody opens on purpose, does not move users off the product they already use. Bing Video and the later Windows Live Video Messages absorbed whatever pieces of the codebase still had value, and the soapbox.msn.com URL went the way of the rest of the MSN subdomain estate.

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