After a brief moment in the sun, Cache is no more: Today, Microsoft killed off its Cache app and service.
“Moving forward, we won’t develop Cache as a stand-alone product anymore, and we will shut down the Cache service on the 28th of February, 2017,” an email notification from Microsoft explains.
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Why Microsoft killed Cache is unclear, and there are vague hints in the message that Cache functionality may live on in other Microsoft products or services. Perhaps even Windows.
“Last year, we set off on a mission to build the simplest way for people to organize their digital stuff around the things important to them, and evolved the OneClip app to Cache,” the message notes. “We launched through The Microsoft Garage to bring Cache to you and learn from your feedback.”
“Over the course of this year, we learned that there was an appetite for a service like Cache, but more importantly, your feedback taught us a lot about the extent of the challenges people have with managing and organizing their work.”
We’ve actually written about Cache quite a bit here on Thurrott.com.Brad noted in August 2016 that it was essentially “an Internet clipboard for everything.” In October, Rafael did the first hands-on exploration of the app. I also looked at Cache, in December, and reported on its official description, “a visual bookmarking tool” that works cross platform and “allows you to drag text snippets, images, web pages, files, URLs, notes and nearly anything else you might need into the app and then instantly have it available on your iPhone.”
Microsoft says that all Garage projects are experiments by definition and that its experience with this app and service have left it “better equipped to tackle our original mission to help people easily organize their stuff.”
I guess we’ll see how that goes.