By Graham K. Rogers

With one of the ugliest email messages I have seen for a long time, Microsoft demonstrated again that it has no taste. When I managed to focus on the content (black on dark green for Heaven's sake) I was disappointed to read that Microsoft was shutting down its Tag service, albeit in two years' time. For a look at the Tag itself, there should be one at the bottom of this page.

As this is one of the few unique services that Microsoft has come up with that I actually like, this is a slight disappointment: no vote of confidence from Microsoft for its own products.

Instead however, the service is to be migrated to ScanLife:

To help you prepare for the termination of the Microsoft Tag service on August 19, 2015, Scanbuy has been selected to support Microsoft Tag technology on the ScanLife platform beginning no later than September 18th, 2013, and to offer transition and migration services to Microsoft TAG customers who choose to migrate to the ScanLife platform. This transition path will help you to continue running your campaigns using Microsoft Tags on the ScanLife platform.

There are some links to the ScanLife operation to help those interested to have an early look. One notes that at the bottom of that page, there is no Tag, but they do display a QR code quite prominently.

Such is progress. . . .

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand where he is also Assistant Dean. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.