Channel 9 was a

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

website for hosting videos and podcasts that Microsoft employees create. Launched in 2004 when Microsoft's corporate reputation was at a low, Channel 9 was the company's first

blog A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...

. It was named after the

United Airlines United Airlines, Inc. is a Major airlines of the United States, major airline in the United States headquartered in Chicago, Chicago, Illinois that operates an extensive domestic and international route network across the United States and six ...

audio channel that lets airplane passengers listen to the cockpit's conversations unhindered; the site published conversations among Microsoft developers, rather than its chairman

Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American businessman and philanthropist. A pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, he co-founded the software company Microsoft in 1975 with his childhood friend ...

, who had historically been the "face" of Microsoft. This made it an inexpensive alternative to Microsoft's

Professional Developers Conference Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) was a series of conferences for software developers; the conference was held infrequently to coincide with beta releases of the Microsoft Windows, Windows operating system, and showcased topic ...

, then the main public platform where customers and outside developers could speak to Microsoft employees without the intervention of the company's PR department. The Channel 9 team produced interviews with

, Erik Meijer, and Mark Russinovich. On November 5, 2021, it was announced that

would merge Channel 9 into

Microsoft Learn Microsoft Learn is a library of technical documentation and training for end users, developers, and IT professionals who work with Microsoft products. Microsoft Learn was introduced in September 2018. In 2022, Microsoft Docs, the technical documen ...

. The move was completed on December 1, effectively rendering the original site defunct. However, past videos from the former site can still be seen there. Channel 9, however, was not a community website and did not host any content made by the community. That had not always been the case. The site once hosted discussion forums, as well as a

wiki A wiki ( ) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...

based on Microsoft's own

FlexWiki The history of wikis began in 1994, when Ward Cunningham gave the name " WikiWikiWeb" to the knowledge base, which ran on his company's website at c2.com, and the wiki software that powered it. The wiki went public in March 1995, the date used ...

. The wiki had been used to provide ''ad hoc'' feedback to Microsoft teams, such as the

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated as IE or MSIE) is a deprecation, retired series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft that were u ...

team.

References

External links

* (Redirect) * (Archived) * (new site for hosting content) {{Microsoft Microsoft websites Computing websites

See also

References

External links