Community is like a box of chocolates, you never....
I’m a little late to be blogging this, but Joe had a great blog post about the value of web forum based communities for Microsoft. It’s a question we get to answer a lot with old school MSFTies and I’m glad I now have a great post to point them at.
…the new forums hosted on https://forums.Microsoft.com are not newsgroup replacements, nor were they ever intended to be. You know, two flavors of the same ice cream? I like coffee, you like tea…that kind of thing. The real goal with the forums is to create another community channel for peer-to-peer support that reaches a huge segment of customers that we’ve never reached before—people who have never used Usenet, or didn’t like its experience. Our experience so far with the MSDN Forums shows that this group of customers was being largely neglected in the past. We have over 50,000 registered users on the MSDN site, posting over 2,500 questions a week. Last year at this time, this channel didn’t even exist. In the same time, the Microsoft newsgroups have declined in post volume around 8%...