Windows Meeting Space

~ the eulogy ~

There is a category of Windows feature that shipped to hundreds of millions of machines and was opened by almost nobody, and Meeting Space belongs near the front of it. Vista was on machines around me from 2007 onward. I cannot remember opening this once, and I have never met anyone who described using it.

It came in the box with Windows Vista on 30 January 2007 as the replacement for NetMeeting, which had been sitting in Windows since 1996 and was showing it. The pitch was reasonable enough. Two people in the same room or on the same network could start a session, share a whole desktop or a single document, mark up what they were looking at with a pen, and send files across. Up to ten could connect at once. If there was no network at all it could raise an ad hoc wireless one between the laptops and run over that, which was the clever part and still reads well today.

It was the first application built on the peer-to-peer framework Microsoft added in Vista, and People Near Me, the service that found other users on your subnet, came with it. That framework required IPv6. In 2007 that was a decision with consequences.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

The replacement had less in it than the thing it replaced. NetMeeting did audio and video conferencing from 1996 onward, badly and over modems, but it did them. Meeting Space did not do either. Somebody at Microsoft decided that voice and video were solved elsewhere by 2007, which was true in the sense that Skype existed and false in the sense that Meeting Space was now a meeting tool you could not hold a meeting on without a phone in your other hand.

Then there were the edition limits. Vista Starter could not run it at all. Home Basic could join a session somebody else had started but could not start one. So the number of people you could actually meet with was the number of people you knew who had bought a sufficiently expensive copy of an operating system that a large part of the market was refusing to upgrade to.

~ the funny part ~

Windows 7 launched on 22 October 2009 without it, and Microsoft's recommendation was Office Live Meeting, a paid product from a different division. Two years and nine months is short even by the standards of things cut between Windows releases, and the reason is not mysterious. Meeting Space was designed for a world where everyone in the room ran the same recent version of Windows and the network stack underneath had already moved on. Both halves of that were assumptions about the future rather than descriptions of 2007.

The job it was aiming at did not go away. Screen sharing between two people on different machines turned out to be one of the most-used pieces of software of the following decade, and the products that won it were web-based and cared nothing about which operating system anyone was running. Meeting Space failed at the exact thing the winners treated as the first requirement, which was working for anybody who was invited.

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