Did Microsoft Actually Stop Accepting Bitcoins?

According to some news yesterday, Microsoft no longer accepts bitcoin for payments. There were so many early adopters of Bitcoin until last year. Some early adopters have retracted support mainly due to high transaction fees and slow speed. It seems that dealing in Bitcoin has become uninteresting for some businesses.
It's reasonable to say that Microsoft is the biggest company to revamp its support for Bitcoin lately, although it has always offered limited support. Remarkably, Bitcoin is no longer counted among its “active payment instruments”.

Is Microsoft No Longer Interested in Bitcoin?

Microsoft support pages for bitcoin are still up on their website. You can google “Microsoft Bitcoin” and you will see these pages come up. They can give you information about how to use bitcoin as a payment but based on the news, it’s halted. Bitcoin seems to be on the rocks right now. To be specific, the coin has become increasingly hard to use. Transaction delays and skyrocketing network fees make it look like a store of value and less of a currency. In fact, many professional opinions say that it is not ideal for a currency at all, given its extreme volatility. Even so, these statements don’t seem to affect Bitcoin value or its trajectory. On the other hand, these ongoing issues may prompt companies which accept Bitcoin payments to slowly rethink their strategies.

According to a recent chat log with Microsoft support staff, the Bitcoin payment option has been revamped. Moreover, this has been planned for some time now, and the company has been monitoring the ongoing network issues plaguing Bitcoin, including the high fees and transaction delays. These problems have persisted for quite some time now, but things are not improving. In fact, the situation is growing worse every year.
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Microsoft's announcement was a very interesting development but...

Microsoft apologized yesterday and said that it was an accidental announcement that it would no longer accept bitcoin as per CNBC.

Contrary to earlier news, Microsoft users, it turns out, can still use Bitcoin to buy products in the Windows and Xbox stores. Earlier on Monday, their announcement mistakenly suggested they had stopped accepting bitcoin payments.

"We apologize for inaccurate information that was inadvertently posted to a Microsoft site, which is currently being corrected," a spokesman told CNBC. Source

The concerned post on Microsoft's website has been deleted. It said that there was no more bitcoin for Windows 10 and Windows 10 mobile. The post spread rapidly on Sunday and became a sensation in the technology blogsphere.
The erroneous post read:

"You can no longer redeem Bitcoin into your Microsoft account," "Existing balances in your account will still be available for purchases from Microsoft Store, but can't be refunded." Microsoft has been accepting bitcoins since December of 2014 for Windows 10 store purchases made in the United States.

Transactions were processed through the BitPay, a popular trading site. BitPay has experienced 110% growth in the volume of bitcoin transactions in 2015 compared to the previous year, according to a blog post this January.

Is Ripple a More Viable Option for Microsoft?

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XRP claims to be the only digital asset which was clearly designed to solve this multi-trillion dollar problem. -The obvious challenges that banks, payment platforms, and companies face. In order to solve this problem completely, cost, speed, and scalability are very important. When you compare the top digital currencies for these criteria, it’s clear that XRP is the winner based on their charts.

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Bill Gates made some positive remarks about Ripple some time ago and they actually have a partnership. The only thing that seems to prevent Microsoft from outright switching to Ripple is that Bitcoin is still being utilized and accessible to more people. Technology-wise though, Ripple is way ahead of Bitcoin as well as other cryptos derived from it. You can see that even Bitcoin Cash, which is relatively new, is much slower compared to Ripple.
This is bad news for Bitcoin since it seems it is losing its utility. The coin’s value has been driven by popularity. -Not cutting edge technology. It’s actually ‘first-generation’ so to speak. There were too many forks happening as well. So there’s a lot of things going on around bitcoin. The community must come together to blow a big horn to the lightning network: Reduce fees! Improve the speed because it's going to lose its utility.

So far, Bitcoin is still being utilized by a majority of people and that fact supports its value. Now, understandably, it takes a lot of time to divert a large audience and apply huge changes. Remember our discussion on Facebook Decentralization?. There is often resistance to change whether positive or negative. It takes a lot of effort to let's say exit the 'earth platform' but once in space, we hardly ever need thrust to stay in 'orbit'.

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