Since 2004, Microsoft has had a free blogging-cum-social networking platform it called Windows Live Spaces (née MSN Spaces). Though it attracted a few users, it never gained a huge amount of traction in the market, and lacked the range of features found in more mainstream blogging platforms. So it's perhaps unsurprising that Microsoft is killing off Live Spaces.

What is surprising is what Microsoft is replacing it with. Try to create a Live Space blog now, and you'll be directed to WordPress.com, the hosted blogging service powered by the WordPress blog software. For its part, WordPress now includes some additional features to make it a suitable slot-in replacement for Live Spaces; old Spaces can now be imported into WordPress.com blogs, and WordPress.com blog updates can be published via Messenger Connect.

Windows Live Essentials 2011 will also update the Windows Live Writer WYSIWYG blog editor so that it defaults to publishing to WordPress.com accounts.

The decision is not, in and of itself, likely to cause any real upheaval or upset. WordPress is a better platform than Live Spaces was, and as a platform, WordPress is far more widely used. WordPress also has a rich selection of extensions and paid upgrades, a reflection of its popularity. Existing users will have to learn a new platform, but they'll be better off for doing so.

You mean other people make software worth using?

But this is a remarkable decision nonetheless. Microsoft is king of Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome. The company has historically chosen to reinvent the wheel on many occasions: creating its own audio and video codecs, its own network protocols, and its own programming languages.

It's not just external inventions that get ignored. Product teams within Microsoft even reinvent other Microsoft software: many of the programming tools overlap and duplicate functionality, many teams have recreated the same user interface concepts over and over. For example, there are at least four different "ribbon" implementations (Office, native Windows Ribbon Framework, MFC, WPF) which all look and behave slightly differently from each other. This is bad for users—programs that look superficially similar have different behavior depending on the which ribbon they use—and wasteful for Microsoft.

The developers can always have some rationale (i.e., the other team's code isn't good enough for some reason, leaving no choice but to start from scratch), but this ignores a much larger issue. Even if teams think their own implementation is superior, hence making their software better, they're actually making their software worse, because it's now needlessly inconsistent and slower to develop.

In its most extreme form, it leads to waste of hundreds of millions of dollars; as part of the KIN debacle, Microsoft bought the successful phone-and-online-services company Danger, and then made Danger rewrite its software to make it use Windows CE instead of NetBSD. Not because there was anything wrong with NetBSD, mind you, but NetBSD wasn't a Microsoft product, so it simply could not be used. One might argue that this may have been the right move long-term, but in the short-term it was a disaster, resulting in a product that was 18 months late and doomed to irrelevance.

Not Invented Here syndrome is not universally bad—sometimes reinventions are a marked improvement on the original. We're all better off for Apple having reinvented Xerox's GUI concept, for example. Bing could be considered to be a reinvention of Google, but Microsoft regards the search market as strategically important: developing the capability in-house makes sense here. But when it is a consistent, almost reflexive response to any problem—and particularly when the reinvented versions are inferior to the originals—it is a problem. It wastes time and money, and leaves the re-inventor trailing behind its competitors.

As such, the switch to WordPress.com—a blog platform written in PHP, hosted on Apache—marks a distinct break from Microsoft tradition. In the blog post announcing the change, the company freely acknowledged that the focus should be on providing the best possible consumer experience, and when this means using best-of-breed third-party services, that should be the approach.

Windows Live: working with you, not against you

The Windows Live team has realized it's no longer necessary to try to build everything in-house and try to compete in every single possible market. Instead, the company is focusing on those areas where it can provide unique value—the Windows Live Writer blogging software, the Windows Live social networking aggregation, integration with Messenger, and so on.

In a similar vein to this, a few weeks ago Microsoft told Ars "nobody wants another Facebook". Facebook is already the best-of-breed social networking platform. It's where the users are, it's where third-parties are writing applications, it's where the interest is. The Microsoft of old might have tried to build its own Facebook (or at least purchase a competitor and bring it into the fold). But the Windows Live team recognizes that this isn't actually providing what users want. We already have our friends set up on Facebook. A new service just gets in the way of the messaging, photo sharing, and virtual farming that we want to do. Integrating Messenger with Facebook enriches our experience in a way that reinvention does not.

This change in attitude has not occurred overnight. Two years ago, when Microsoft first started talking about the Windows Live Essentials, the express intention was to break down the barriers that exist in the online world. It's common to have lots of silos of data—for example, I have photos in Flickr, Facebook, and SkyDrive—that can't be managed or manipulated in a uniform way. With Windows Live Photo Gallery, I can publish to any of these quickly and easily. It's not perfect, as it's still frustratingly unidirectional (I can publish to these different places, but not readily browse them or move files between them), but nonetheless it demonstrates the broader point: Microsoft can provide value without having to reinvent the wheel.

This is a positive move from the software giant. Using the best of what third parties have to offer frees the company to focus on the important thing: making better software. This is a win for customers and Redmond alike. Customers get software that works with the services they use, and that does new and useful things. Microsoft gets more streamlined, more responsive development, and produces software that enhances, rather than detracts from, the Windows brand.

Can other parts of Microsoft learn from the Windows Live team? Not Invented Here syndrome doesn't disappear overnight. Fiefdoms exist in every massive company, and one way for their lords to remain in power is to maintain that tools and practices used elsewhere in the business can always be remade better. The desire to constantly reinvent the wheel is deeply ingrained within Microsoft. In many ways, Redmond appears stuck in neutral. Cultural changes such as the one that has Windows Live Spaces bloggers switching to WordPress have the potential to shift the software giant into forward gear, if they are allowed to spread.