Skip to main content

Microsoft Garage shuttering experimental Cache app at the end of February

microsoft garage releases project lively collaboration tool
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Microsoft has a group of employees called The Garage, which the company refers to as a “no-holds-barred ode to hack culture.” The Garage pumps out software for every major platform (mainly Windows 10, iOS, and Android) that’s outside the realm of the company’s for-sale products and services and that often serves as research projects for new technology and concepts.

As such, Garage apps are more informal and don’t come with the same support and guarantees as Microsoft’s official offerings. Anyone using a Garage app is probably well served to treat it as a mere technology showcases rather than something to be relied upon, as the shuttering of Microsoft’s Cache digital organization app suggests.

Microsoft Cache was an app and service that let users capture and organize various digital information, including files, web pages, reference material, text snippets, and notes. The resulting content could be easily organized by project, client, task, and idea to allow for easy groupings that helped show relationships between data.

Information stored in Cache collections was instantly available to other Windows 10 machines and iPhones, and the original source was stored to make it easy to return to the original content. Finally, Cache maintained a clipboard history with a timeline to let you remember bits of information captured in the past.

The Microsoft Garage team decided to discontinue development of the Cache app and to shut down the Cache service on February 28. A blog post announced the death of Cache: “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. 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.”

Microsoft makes note of the fact that Garage projects are “experiments by definition,” and that the company will now be “better equipped to tackle [its] original mission to help people easily organize their stuff.” The team provided no information on if or how information from Cache could be migrated to other solutions, such as Microsoft’s own OneNote app, so if you’re using Cache, you’ll want to take advantage of the time remaining to put your information somewhere else.

Editors' Recommendations

Mark Coppock
Mark has been a geek since MS-DOS gave way to Windows and the PalmPilot was a thing. He’s translated his love for…
Microsoft just scored a big win with Apple
Apple TV preview for the Microsoft App Store.

Microsoft is gearing up to have Apple TV and Apple Music be the next applications available for download on its Microsoft Store.

The apps are currently available as preview versions, which are compatible with Windows 11, according to @ALumia_Italia (via Thurrott).

Read more
Microsoft’s new Designer app offers DALL-E-like AI art creation for all
microsoft designer app offers dall e experience for more creative projects

Among the new creator tools announced for Microsoft 365, Microsoft Edge, and Bing on Wednesday is Microsoft Designer, an AI-powered app that allows you to start with a concept and let the technology do most of the work in developing a creative project.

Microsoft Designer is based on an AI technology similar to DALL-E 2, which was created by OpenAI. The text-to-art generator recently became available to the public after a popular waitlist period following its April 2022 launch.

Read more
Why I still use Microsoft’s Office suite instead of Google’s free options
Computer user touching on Microsoft word icon to open the program.

You can find all sorts of comparisons if you search the internet for Microsoft Office versus Google apps. And these side-by-side comparisons are helpful if you’re deciding between the two productivity suites. If it comes to cost, many simply find Google’s free apps like Docs, Sheets, and Slides the obvious choice. 

But if you’re like me and use these types of applications many, many times per day, or even for running a small business, you have to look at more than the price tag.

Read more