Internal Microsoft emails show that most 'Live Spaces' blogs were dead isn't getting 30m Live Spaces users - think of a much smaller number. No, smaller than that. And Microsoft isn't getting Wordpress to shift to Azure either. (Updated)

Perfect kit for finding Windows Live Spaces users. Photo by windy_ on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Is getting all those Windows Live Space users really that much of a coup? There was plenty of excitement on the Windows Live Space blog and the blog about how "30 million" (say it in a Dr Evil voice) blog would get moved over from Windows Live Spaces to Wordpress because, um, well, nice weather we're having... Nobody seemed able to explain quite why. Or, in other words, Microsoft had signally failed to monetise those blogs. (Couldn't it have done what Mark Zuckerberg did with Facebook and just let it grow? Anyway.)

Now Joe Wilcox at Betanews says he has obtained copies of internal Microsoft emails which suggest that 99% of those 30m blogs are "dead".

The email exchange dates from 28 September, Wilcox says, the day after the announcement. Wilcox says he's not naming the participants because that might mean trouble for those involved. (Er, yes.)

As Wilcox sagely notes,


"However, according to a senior Microsoft manger e-mailing colleagues: "The net is: 300k sites are expected to migrate of the 30M 'blogs' -- most are dead. Wordpress is adding somewhere in the order of zero servers to handle this capacity. This was a 'who has the best online service for blogging for our customers' and had nothing to do with technology."

But it turns out there's a little more to this than meets the eye. Microsoft would dearly love Automattic - the company behind - to shift to using its Azure cloud system (it's like Amazon's Elastic Cloud Compute system, better known as EC2). Last November at its Professional Developer Conference Microsoft suggested (or let it be thought) that Wordpress/Automattic is hosted on Azure, or would soon be moving over. From the transcript: "One company I'd like to highlight is Automattic, developer of WordPress. WordPress is one of the most successful and pervasive blogging systems in existence today, used by tens of millions of bloggers worldwide. WordPress is also a tremendous ISV who's been working extensively with Windows Azure during the CTP...."

But that isn't the case at all.

As the Automattic blog pointed out soon afterwards in an FAQ: "Q: Are you moving to Azure?
A: No., which is Automattic's hosted blogging service, is going to stay on its existing infrastructure. Martin Cron from the Cheezburger Network launched a new blog Oddly Specific on Azure, which some people confused with Automattic."

The existing infrastructure, since you wondered, being Linux/Apache LiteSpeed (which says it's "Apache-interchangeable" - thanks @mutante in the comments)/PHP/MySQL.

And that's the crux, as Wilcox points out, of those internal emails. The Windows/Azure sales people are wailing: "Waah! Everyone is reading that there are 30 million blogs moving from Live Spaces on Azure/Windows to that damn Linux!" So the managers at Microsoft are trying to calm them down by saying that hell, there weren't that many people using them anyway.

However, neither end of the argument looks good for Microsoft's online efforts. Either it's giving up on a huge monetisation opportunity... or it never made any impact in blog hosting. So, choose your embarrassment, Mr Ballmer.

Update: in the comments Paul Kim, Automattic's VP of user growth (and the Wordpress side of the excited blog comments of the other day) says: "We don't have an exact estimate for how many Spaces bloggers will move over to in the next 6 months, but in the first 48 hours we've completed close to 50,000 blog migrations which is very promising. (If there are only 300,000 actual active blogs (1% of 30 million), we'll be able to determine that very soon.)"