Update - Microsoft Responds to the Evolution of Community
 

Microsoft is posting a new message (with the Subject as I used here) and
basically they're defining a timeline for group removal and their server
shutdown.

In the groups where they are posting this message to, they are saying
this:

-----------
Which Newsgroups Are Affected by this Shutdown?
All public newsgroups will eventually be closed between June 1, 2010 and
October 1, 2010. Microsoft will be closing newsgroups in a phased
approach,
starting with the least active newsgroups and moving eventually to more
active ones throughout the course of the next six months.

When will this Happen?
Effective June 1, 2010 this newsgroup will be closed.
------------

I happened to see this in microsoft.public.win98.performance.

Microsoft is also saying this:

------------
In addition to offering a compelling online browser experience, for
those
users who prefer to use an NNTP (newsgroup) reader to participate in the
newsgroups community, we have developed a solution called the NNTP
Bridge
which allows a user to connect a variety of supported NNTP readers to
the
forums they would like to participate in and continue having the NTTP
reader
functionality.
------------

So it's bizarre why they are closing down their usenet server (which is
linked into their current web-forum interface) simply to create a new
web-based forum interface AND create an NNTP connection to the new
forums.

What Microsoft is doing here is clear. It's no so much that they want
to re-engineer or re-invent their "communities" support structure, they
simply want to divorce themselves from the world-wide usenet
communications system, while still providing NNTP interface to what-ever
comes next.

This is to control the content of the material posted to the new forums,
because under the current arrangement they clearly don't or can't
control what gets posted to these groups via external servers.