The microsoft.public.* groups

Long-form reference · 3,375 words · about a 15-minute read

A company hierarchy on a public protocol

The machine at the root of it was called msnews.microsoft.com, and reaching it required nothing that a Windows desktop did not already have. The instructions Microsoft printed in MSDN Magazine in May 2004 ran to three steps: open Outlook Express, go to Tools, then Accounts, then the News tab and add a news account; supply a name and an address; and when the wizard asked for the NNTP server, type msnews.microsoft.com. The first download of the group list might be slow, the article warned, and everything after that was ordinary newsreader work — filter the list by keyword, double-click the groups you wanted, synchronise the account and read offline.

The same article is the best surviving measure of how large the list was. Microsoft, it said, offered more than 1,900 public and 500 private newsgroups that cover all aspects of Microsoft products and technologies, and an individual group might get up to 15,000 postings per month. Six years later the company’s own shutdown announcement put the figures higher: more than 2000 public newsgroups covering virtually all its products, and more than 2,200 private newsgroups for specific audiences including partner programmes and MVPs. Those are the only two counts Microsoft appears to have published, and the private side had grown four times over between them.

The public and private halves worked differently, and the difference matters for anyone reading the archive today. The public groups were fed out into Usenet proper; in the magazine’s own words they live on servers outside of Microsoft and were available locally to customers via ISPs around the world, as well as through an online reader at MSDN Online. The private groups were not: they were reachable only by connecting directly to Microsoft’s own servers, and each set required an account and a password.

Only the public half concerns this directory. Everything listed above sat under the microsoft.public prefix — which is why the hierarchy is usually called microsoft.public.* although the top-level name was simply microsoft. The short explanation of Usenet covers the protocol these groups travelled on.

How the names were built

The naming was catalogue naming rather than subject naming. After the fixed microsoft.public stem came a product or technology, then as many further components as the support load justified: a component, a version, a task. A group existed because a product existed and generated questions, and the depth of the name recorded how many questions it drew. Shallow names such as microsoft.public.windowsupdate covered a whole service; deep ones such as microsoft.public.windows.mediacenter.hometheaterpc narrowed to one use of one edition of one operating system.

The ten groups on this page show the pattern at several depths at once. microsoft.public.excel.programming and microsoft.public.word.numbering split single applications by the kind of problem being brought; microsoft.public.scripting.vbscript and microsoft.public.platformsdk.security follow developer surfaces rather than shipped products; microsoft.public.windowsupdate follows a service. The full directory of what the gateway carried is on the all-groups list.

One consequence of naming by catalogue is visible in the list without any need to open the groups. Windows Management Instrumentation appears three separate times, under three different parents: microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.wmi, microsoft.public.win32.programmer.wmi and microsoft.public.windowsxp.wmi. The same technology was reachable from the managed framework, from the Win32 API and from the operating system, and each route had its own audience, so each route got its own group. A consensus-run hierarchy would have argued about whether one group would do; a vendor hierarchy simply created three, because three product teams owned three doors onto the same thing.

The hierarchy also branched by language. microsoft.public.fr.scripting.ie-oe-animation shows the form: a two-letter language component inserted directly after the stem, with the topical name rebuilt beneath it. Language was a first-class axis of the namespace rather than an afterthought — when Microsoft published the directory of its own hierarchy it published it twice, once ordered by name and once ordered by language and topic.

Read down the whole namespace and it becomes an index of the product line: win95, win98, windowsxp, vsnet, dotnet.framework, platformsdk, mediacenter. Names entered as products shipped and stopped being extended as products aged, so the shape of the hierarchy is itself a dated record of what Microsoft was selling.

Created and closed by one hand

This is where microsoft.public.* parts company with the hierarchies it sat beside on the same servers. To create a group in the Big Eight — comp, humanities, misc, news, rec, sci, soc and talk — a proposer had to post a Request For Discussion into news.announce.newgroups, see it argued out in news.groups.proposals, formalise a name, description and charter, and then wait on a vote by the Big-8 Management Board. The procedure was slow by design, and its point was that no single party owned the namespace. The alt.* hierarchy inverted the same principle rather than abandoning it: anybody could create a group there and anybody could remove one, so no single party owned that namespace either.

microsoft.* was neither. It was a corporate hierarchy, of the kind Usenet reference works file under the heading of the further hierarchies carried on many news servers outside the Big Eight and alt.*, alongside national hierarchies and other vendors’ product groups. There was no RFD, no discussion period, no call for votes and no board. A group came into being when a Microsoft team decided a product needed one, and it went away when Microsoft decided it did not. No charter was ever ratified for any of these groups in the sense the Big-8 process meant by the word; the descriptions that circulated with the group list were vendor descriptions, written the way product documentation is written.

What kept the arrangement from being merely a private forum was propagation. Once Microsoft fed the public groups outward, every other news administrator on the network made an independent decision about whether to carry them, how long to retain them and whether to keep carrying them afterwards. Microsoft controlled the origin; it did not control the copies. That is the whole reason a corporate namespace could appear in a subscriber’s group list next to comp.* and rec.*, and it is also the reason the hierarchy did not vanish when the origin server did.

The asymmetry cut both ways. Microsoft could add hundreds of groups without asking anyone, and could close every one of them by announcement, which is what happened in 2010 — and the groups still did not disappear, because by then they were not Microsoft’s to delete.

Who answered the questions

The MSDN Magazine piece of May 2004 names the population precisely: the newsgroup community, it says, was made up of expert Microsoft developers, Microsoft support professionals, MSDN subscribers, Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs), IT professionals, and other developers exchanging ideas and providing programming solutions.

Against that background there was exactly one documented service-level commitment, and it did not apply to the hierarchy at large. About 220 groups were designated MSDN Managed Community Newsgroups, and in those, the magazine states, MSDN subscribers are guaranteed priority service, receiving responses to their technical questions within two business days. The managed set was chosen by subject area — .NET development, data access, web services, graphics — and included groups such as microsoft.public.platformsdk.msi, microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.windowsforms, microsoft.public.win32.programmer.networks, microsoft.public.vsnet.general and microsoft.public.dotnet.framework. No such commitment attached to any other group, and the difference between a managed group and an unmanaged one was invisible from the outside: same protocol, same client, same list, no marking on the article.

Product teams also worked the groups deliberately rather than casually. MSDN Magazine described the arrangement in February 2003 under the name Community Room, in which Visual Studio team members spent several hours each month answering customer questions online, and reported that the teams closely monitor the microsoft.public.* newsgroups for any Visual Studio .NET questions that have gone unanswered after 24 hours. The stated purpose was twofold: to catch the hardest questions, the ones the volunteer population had already failed to clear, and to find problems that needed fixing in the shipping product. The twenty-four-hour threshold was the filter that separated the two.

One piece of housekeeping advice shapes what the archive looks like. Because the groups were public and harvested for spam lists, Microsoft advised participants to post under a modified address rather than a working one — the magazine’s own example mangles both the mailbox and the domain. A high proportion of the From lines in the archive are therefore deliberately broken rather than corrupt.

The MVP award

The Most Valuable Professional award is the part of this story that outlived the newsgroups. Microsoft describes it as recognition for technology experts who share their knowledge with the community, given for a person’s Microsoft-related activity, contributions and influence over the previous year. The crucial mechanical detail is that the recognition lasts one year and must be re-earned: an MVP was an MVP for a term, not for good, and the term was assessed on the last twelve months of visible contribution.

The programme grew out of the software developer community, and the earliest recipients were the people most active in online peer support — on Usenet and on CompuServe. The origin account its own recipients repeat traces it to the CompuServe FoxPro forum, where an independent developer compiled what participants called Calvin’s List: a ranking of the forum’s contributors by messages sent and received. Microsoft staff, as the story goes, seized on that list as a way of identifying high contributors.

What recognition conferred was narrow. MVPs were not employees, were not paid for answering, and had no authority over the groups: no moderator status and no privileged posting path. What they had was identification. Recognised MVPs commonly said so in their signature blocks, often with the dates of their award terms — one such block, preserved on a 2011 posting in Microsoft’s forums, lists terms running unbroken from October 2004 to September 2010 — so a reader scanning a thread could see at a glance which answers came from someone Microsoft had publicly vouched for. Usenet carried no reputation system of its own, so a self-declared, externally granted, annually renewed label was the only such marker a thread could show.

The programme’s sharpest moment on the record came on 22 October 1999, when a Microsoft executive circulated a message announcing that the MVP programme was being cancelled. The timing is usually read against a contemporaneous suit brought against AOL by its community leaders, who argued they should have been paid for the hours they put in online. The reaction was immediate and public, including mail sent directly to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, and Microsoft rescinded the cancellation three days later. The reversal was followed by investment rather than retrenchment: an argument inside the company about which division carried the cost, a new Director of Community post filled by one of the original CompuServe engineers, and a dedicated coordinator, site resources and support engineers attached to the programme. It ended up listed among the seven Big Bets set by Microsoft’s board for 2007.

Announcements inside the groups

Microsoft used its own hierarchy as a publishing channel as well as a support channel. Wikipedia’s account of Internet Explorer for UNIX rests in part on postings made to microsoft.public.inetexplorer.unix, dated 5 October and 31 October 2001, announcing first new test builds and then the release of Service Pack 1 for the Solaris and HP-UX versions. Those two postings are the cited authority for the release dates in that article’s version table.

Corporate notices to the readership followed a house style of their own, and one specimen survives in full because it was carried across into Microsoft’s later web forums. It is headed Reminder - Microsoft Responds to the Evolution of Community, timed 19 May 2010, and posted into microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion. The form is a set of question headings answered in turn — What is Happening?, Why?, Which Newsgroups Are Affected by this Shutdown?, Where Should I go with the Closure of this Newsgroup?, Who Should I Contact with any Questions? — with one paragraph naming the particular forum that group’s readers were being sent to, each group having been promised its equivalent forum by Microsoft’s transition page. The word Reminder in the subject line indicates it was not the first of its kind.

Two things follow for anyone using these groups as a source. The first is that the announcements were posted into the groups rather than published only on the web, so the closure of the hierarchy is documented inside the hierarchy itself. The second is that the notices are corporate documents rather than moderator rulings, because there were no moderators to make rulings. Microsoft settled the point itself in the migration FAQ that accompanied the shutdown, in a passage selling the forums as an improvement: Microsoft newsgroups are not moderated, while the forums will be. Nothing on the public microsoft.public.* groups this directory carried shows the ordinary Usenet marker of moderation — articles routed through a submission address and approved before distribution.

The retirement, June to October 2010

The 2010 notice states the schedule exactly; secondary accounts round it in different directions. Its own words:

All public newsgroups will eventually be closed between June 1, 2010 and October 1, 2010. Microsoft will be closing newsgroups in a phased approach, starting with the least active newsgroups and moving eventually to more active ones throughout the course of the next six months.

So there is no single shutdown date, and sources that give one are compressing. Wikipedia’s article on Usenet records both ends of the compression, noting that Microsoft would discontinue support for its public newsgroups from 1 June 2010 and, elsewhere, that Microsoft closed its news server in June 2010. The phased schedule reconciles the two: the first groups went on 1 June 2010, the busiest went last, and Microsoft’s own transition FAQ said it expected to finish in the autumn. A reader who tried to connect on 5 February 2011 was told in reply, by an MVP in Microsoft’s own forums, that the server had been shut down for good the previous October. Individual closure dates were promised in advance group by group, which means the precise date for any one group is a matter for that group’s own final articles.

The reasoning is set out in the same notice, and is given here as the company’s own account. Traffic in the newsgroups, it said, had been steadily decreasing for several years while customers were increasingly finding solutions in forums on Microsoft properties and third-party sites; consolidating would unify the customer experience, centralise content, make it easier for active contributors to retain their influence, mitigate redundancies and improve indexing by search engines; and forums offered a better user and spam management platform. The accompanying FAQ put numbers to the trend, claiming that over the previous fiscal year unique visitors to the forums had more than doubled while newsgroup traffic had declined by half.

For readers unwilling to give up a newsreader, Microsoft offered a piece of software it called the NNTP Bridge, distributed through its Connect site, which let supported news clients speak to the web forums as though they were newsgroups.

None of this happened in isolation. The commercial Usenet feed was collapsing around the same window: AOL had dropped Usenet access in 2005; Time Warner Cable stopped offering it and Sprint cut the alt.* hierarchies after a 2008 agreement with the New York attorney general; AT&T ended its service on 15 July 2009 and Verizon on 30 September 2009; and in May 2010 — the same month as the Microsoft notice — Duke University decommissioned the news server descended from the site where Usenet had been established three decades earlier. Microsoft’s decision was a large one, but it was a decision to stop paying for a transport that most of the industry had already stopped paying for.

Where the groups went afterwards

Because the public groups had been fed outward rather than merely hosted, closing msnews.microsoft.com did not close microsoft.public.*. Other operators had carried the hierarchy for years and were free to keep carrying it; when the origin server went dark, readers were pointed at ordinary public news servers — Aioe and Eternal September among them — where the groups continued to accept posts, much more quietly than before.

Microsoft’s own server had never been the archive in any case: the same transition FAQ notes that newsgroup content was deleted after 90 days. The searchable record ended up in Google’s hands by the ordinary route. Web archiving of Usenet had begun with Deja News in March 1995; Google acquired that database in February 2001, having started keeping its own copy of the feed from the second week of August 2000, and the combined Google Groups archive reaches back to May 1981. The microsoft.public.* groups are in it, with message counts running into the hundreds of thousands for the busiest of them, and that archive — not any Microsoft property — is where the substantive history of these groups now lives.

That record is not in good condition. Google closed Google Groups to new Usenet content on 22 February 2024, disallowing posting and subscription while leaving historical material viewable, and by then the abandoned groups had spent years accumulating bulk spam, so the most recent pages of any microsoft.public.* group are largely worthless. The useful material sits underneath it. Usenet itself continues on other servers; how to reach it today is covered separately.

What did not survive is the private side. The member-only groups — 500 of them in 2004, more than 2,200 by 2010 — never entered the public spool by design, no third-party server carried them, and there is no equivalent archive. Whatever was written in them is gone unless Microsoft kept it internally.

What the record does not settle

Four things this page cannot settle. The first is the beginning. Microsoft no longer publishes a founding date for its public news service, and the surviving first-party documents describe the hierarchy only once it was already enormous. The earliest firm dated evidence traced for this page is an MSDN Magazine column of February 2003 telling readers to point a newsreader at msnews.microsoft.com; the names reach back much further, since a namespace containing win95 and win98 branches plainly predates that, but a specific start date is not something this page can honestly assert.

The second is the count. Only two first-party figures survive, from May 2004 and from the 2010 announcement, and each is a snapshot with a date on it rather than a constant: the hierarchy grew and shrank continuously as products shipped and were retired, and no series of counts was published from which a curve could be drawn.

The third is the closure detail. The phased shutdown means every group has its own last day somewhere between 1 June and 1 October 2010, and no consolidated list of those dates appears to have been published or preserved. For an individual group, the only reliable source is the tail of its own archive.

And the fourth is the human record. There was no moderator roster, no published list of which groups were in the managed set beyond the handful named in print, and no register of MVPs by group. The volunteers who did most of the answering are identifiable only from their own postings, and this directory does not attempt to name them.