Microsoft officially announced the closure of it’s SLIPS suite, a set of tools for adding licensing and demo features to your .NET applications. The blame goes to low ROI. Off course the competition in application licensing and innovative ideas of other vendors should attributed to this decision.

The official announcement goes like this:

As of September 23, Microsoft has stopped selling SLP Services. Many ISVs still use home grown software protection solutions, and the return on investment in this area is less than we hoped for. We will continue to create and improve our own internal licensing and protection technologies, but we will no longer be selling any such solutions externally.

Over the last several months the team has done a lot of work to understand the long-term opportunity for the SLPS business and establish its viability as a Microsoft investment. It has become very clear that the opportunity is much smaller than we originally calculated. While the SLPS team did great work on the latest release, the sales haven’t increased to the point where we believe it needs to be.

No more new customers, but the existing customers will be supported probably till the end of the product life. So RIP SLIPS, we are looking forward for alternatives.