No, Microsoft did not release it, a third party did using the windows store and tools Microsoft made to help Linux distributions get into the store. By your logic apple releases every i-phone app ever made.....

It's quite clear in the earnings report they released a few days ago when the users of slashdot went from content producers to audience. "Slashdot Media was acquired to provide content and services that are important to technology professionals in their everyday work lives and to leverage that reach into the global technology community benefiting user engagement on the Dice.com site. The expected benefits have started to be realized at Dice.com. However, advertising revenue has declined over the past year and there is no improvement expected in the future financial performance of Slashdot Media’s underlying advertising business. Therefore, $7.2 million of intangible assets and $6.3 million of goodwill related to Slashdot Media were reduced to zero." Slashdot was purchased to turn it's user base into consumers of other dice products, and they need to modify the site to meet that goal. Saying "abandon the beta" will never work, you can't have sites stay stagnant so there will always need to be development, the community just needs to help them refine the requirements and show Dice that the goals they want to achieve may not be possible with the users of the site they purchased.

At our work the IT guys wanted to set up an IM network for similar reasons. They went with Jabber, and one of the jabber only clients (Coccinella, I think). They have it run through SSL, and set to log. They let some of us (the smart ones) use pidgin if we want multi-protocol clients. It works well and is tied into our Active Directory for accounts via LDAP.

This is indeed for real, it's been in discussion all weekend.