Microsoft's QR code competitor Tag to shut up shop -- hands in two years' notice

You may well not have heard of it -- and even if you have, it's even less likely that you've used it -- but Microsoft's Tag service is to close two years from now. In a statement on the Tag website Microsoft says that it is issuing a two year termination notice in accordance with its Terms of Use and that the service can be used as normal for the next 24 months.

For anyone to whom Microsoft Tag is an unfamiliar name, and this is likely to be a large group, this is -- or perhaps was -- Microsoft's alternative to the QR code. Scan a tag from a magazine or advertisement and you can access content such as websites, videos and more.

While QR codes are small square, scannable icons made up of little pixel-like squares, Tags are comprised of little triangles. This difference aside, and the fact that Tags link to a server that uses an ID to provide content rather than actually including encoded content, Tags and QR codes are much the same.