After six years of providing a useful not-needed alternative to barcodes Microsoft is discontinuing the Microsoft Tag. On August 19th, 2015 Microsoft will no longer support this tag. It would seem that it will not go unused however. Scanbuy is planning on using this tag starting no later than September 18th of this year.
These tags were invented to be able to transfer a lot of data into a single tag. The Microsoft tag is capable of holding up to 3,500 characters per square inch. This also allows the tag creator to know what devices and how often are people scanning this tag. This is because when you can this tag you need to connect to Microsoft’s servers to decipher the tag. These servers can record the frequency of scans and the device connecting to the server to give the barcode creator a good idea of what is working and what is not working.
Microsoft did not have much luck with this tag, they may have if they built the feature in to their context menus in the Windows, Server and RT environments. Perhaps Scanbuy will have much better luck with this tag then Microsoft did.
