Microsoft Sunsets GigJam, Never Found A Place To Party

In 2015 at its then named Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft showed off what the company hoped would be a new service to help streamline workflows and help users get work done. As of Septemeber 22nd, the service will be retired.

The announcement was posted on the company’s blog and does not provide any direct reasoning for the closure of the service.

The oddly named GigJam never quite found its place in Microsoft’s portfolio by trying to create unstructured workflows known gigs. The product was not formally offered to users and only existed in a preview program; with its end now marked on the calendar, it’s safe to say that this product did not materialize in a way that offered meaningful value to its users.

As Mary Jo Foley notes, there isn’t an existing Microsoft product that offers what GigJam was designed to accomplish. That being said, it wouldn’t surprise me if the company finds a way to extract the more valuable parts of the application and include them in other workflow related applications.

Flow automation is a big part of what Microsoft is working towards across several of its platforms including Azure and this service attempted to bring that functionality to the Office workflow.

It’s not often that Microsoft ends the life of a product that had potential in the enterprise. The company is continuously looking for ways to improve the value of Office 365 and GigJam likely could have fit into that portfolio. With that being said, if the application created more noise than value for its users, then it’s a good thing that the company is retiring the application.