Microsoft kills another promising service which did not quite catch on

In tech these days there is a philosophy of failing fast, which in practice means testing ideas in the market to determine whether they have value and to rapidly cut losses when testing reveals something isn’t working and quickly try something else.

The latest victim of the fail fast movement is Microsoft’s little known but very ambitious Gigjam service. Microsoft today announced that they are shutting down the GigJam Preview on September 22, 2017.

Back in 2015,  when Microsoft first revealed GigJam they said it is a breakthrough way to spontaneously and ephemerally involve other people in your work, inside and outside your company. You could just circle the live information you want to share and cross out the parts you don’t. During the launch, Microsoft said that GigJam is designed for the emerging workforce that is more connected, more available and more social than ever before. They even mentioned that business can expect a dramatic transformation of every process where humans have the potential to exercise discretion and work with others, colleagues as well as customers.

A year after the announcement, Microsoft opened the GigJam preview to everyone in June, 2016. In September last year, they expanded support for new interaction styles and content types. First, they added the ability to share slices of images, documents and live line-of-business information with people who aren’t online at the time of sending and expire that information in 24 hours. Second, they added the ability to redact content from images, PDFs or slides, ensuring that an object in a picture, a text block or a particular bullet doesn’t go over to the recipient. Early this year, they released GigJam app for Android devices.

In a blog post, Microsoft today said that the GigJam Preview delivered learnings and insights that will help them in shaping future product experiences. From September 22, any remaining gigs will automatically expire.

As someone who works with and shares a lot of documents, Gigjam sounds like the best service I have never heard of. Are any of our readers users and disappointed? Let us know below.