Killed by Microsoft
killedbymicrosoft.info
killedbymicrosoft.info
Examples:
Skype For Business => Teams.
Microsoft Edge => Chromium Edge.
Windows 10 IoT Core => It's not dead ???
Office Viewer => Web Based Office
Kinect => It's not dead ???
Microsoft Anti-Virus for Windows => Windows Defender
Come on, microsoft has big flaws but backward compat/keeping old product alive is where they are one of the best in the industry.
Would Zoom even exist today if Microsoft never bought Skype?
It's miles ahead any competition and pretty much the only tool which will give you decent calling experience on spotty connections.
Before zoom I was mostly doing audio calls on a computer, with zoom video is easily manageable (actually, not sure if that's a plus for society, it certainly increased the meetings / productiveTime ratio).
Not sure why people are surprised, its enterprise software. Look at SAP, they "kill" their ERP every few years for end-of-life and upgrades. I don't blame them, customers don't sign perpetual deals and they expect to sign a new ones every 5-7 years for whatever the new flavor is. It's different for free products because there is no explicit end of life and it surprises people.
It also seems Microsoft sometimes is held to a higher standard when it comes to supporting products long after they are out of service.
Compare that to Google and Android for instance... it's a big mess with millions of outdated and insecure devices.
It also seems Google sometimes is held to a higher standard when it comes to supporting products long after they are out of service.
Compare that to Microsoft and Windows Phone for instance, or UWP, or even Windows... it's a big mess with millions of outdated and insecure devices.
UWP isn't "dead" and its technologies continue to get updated.
Windows' left behind devices that no longer receive security updates are after at least a decade of active security support. XP was offered several lifelines, way beyond the security support of any single Android version in the history of Android. Windows 7 seems on the path to similar lifelines and maybe won't have quite the same record of security support, but will still see active security patches for much longer than any Android version could imagine.
Once whatsapp and facebook messenger mobile started taking place it was already N years too late. Now in 2022, they have no chance.
- Skype has a full screen button for screen sharing, Teams always takes up some space with their little frames at the sides. Annoying as hell
- Skype has a 'actual size' button. So even if someone shares a bigger screen, you can still read it. On some versions of Teams you can cheat a bit, by holding control and scrolling your mouse wheel. But that is more a side effect of their electron framework than something intentional. Especially non-power users will never discover this
- Skype had way more flexibility in configuring simultaneous call (someone calls your skype but you want your mobile phone to ring when AFK). This is a huge deal to me.
And those are three simple features that greatly impact my quality of life with the product. A non-functional feature would also be the sluggishness. A skype chat window is quick, responsive, instant. Teams always hangs around half a second when switching between chat windows. And on lower performance pc's switching to a chat takes more than a second.
1999 - 2013 MSN Messenger
Killed about 9 years ago, MSN Messenger (later rebranded as Windows Live Messenger) was a cross-platform instant messaging client. It was over 13 years old.
Maybe? That doesn't tell anything about Webex being worse than Teams, though. People may also leave Zoom to make a better Zoom tomorrow.
What I really dislike about teams is that it downgrades my 4K video feed to 480p.
My experience has been the opposite. But that could have just been that it fitted our setup well. Or that I haven't tried better.
It's so bad that eventhough most businesses depend on teams, they, as well as everyone else, would be better off if teams suddenly disappears from one day to another.
edit: Just a few things that annoy me basically on a daily basis:
- The status isn't always up to date. Sometimes it takes minutes to you or your contacts to show the correct status.
- It is (unsupprisingly) not very responsive
- It hogs my CPU when its idle and especially during video calls. So much so that the fans of my 2020 MBP start spinning up - which otherwise only happens when I run a build/tests. This is especcially bad considering all other video call software (zoom, discord) run just fine.
- The UX is terrible when you are active in different organizations. It's riddled with bugs. Every time I switch organizations I have to type in my password twice because for some reason the login session expires instantaniously. If I switch back an forth sometimes some functionality like shring screen or accepting calls just stops working and I have to restart teams.
- It tries to include the formatting if you copy+paste in chat. It always looks bad and sometime is ittetating because the font size is way smaller.
- Cameras or shared desktops regularily freeze
- You cant set the audio level of individual participants. This is especiallly annoying if you're in the same room as other participants of larger meetings since you'd then head them twice.
- Because of the messy permission system between multiple organizations it's often not clear wether or not you can certain contacts of are allowed to use the chat in meetings.
To communicate you've got "Chat" then "Teams", On "Chat" you can reply to one message, and on "Teams" you can post on the Threads to reply.
On the UX side, at one point I experienced bad memory leak if GPU acceleration was enabled, The shortcut for starting the voice call is the same as the "paste only the text" shortcut in other application (causing more than one department wide voice conference started by accident)
Is that a recent change? Up until a few month ago I worked at a company that banned the Zoom client for "security reasons" and had to use Zoom on the web for all my Zoom meetings and it never was a problem.
However Teams has no more or less QA and other problems than ever other MS product I use... I dont know if that is good or bad but ......
- I can’t create bullet points and numbered lists because breaklines will frequently send the message instead of continuing the list.
- You’ve already mentioned this, but the ability to change volume for individual speakers should be considerer core functionality. I’d rather use Discord for office work than Teams for this reason alone.
What’s weird to me is that Teams, for me at least, was a good product about 3 or 4 years ago. Definitely more stable back then; I had fewer complaints.
Try pasting with Ctrl-Shift-V instead of Ctrl-V
Why restart the application if it cannot connect to the internet? Why can't I have native notifications? Why iOS app's notifications are unreliable?
I really can't believe the quality of this thing. While I don't like Microsoft, I agree that they can write semi-decent software. Teams is not one of them.
You mean that simple tasks take many billable hours?
Hmmm ...
Product A costs 2 bazillion, and is perfect - for a 10 year lifetime, it works perfectly and requires no support. Zero additional cost.
Product B does about the same, costs only 1 bazillion, but is rather shoddy - over a 10 year lifetime, it will require a further 3 bazillion worth of fixes, support and extra resources. That does feed a lot of families, though.
Take your guess at what happens.
Yeah, me neither.
Maybe it's part of some Office / Outlook insane bundle from hell?
Free zoom with the 40m limit provides a better experience.
I’m no fan of MS, but they tend to err on the side of overextending support and backwards compatibility. I would have killed Works 10 years before they did.
And some of these are just failures. I still have my MS Bob floppies, but come on.
But I kinda wonder the same thing about Apple’s Pages/Numbers/Keynote. I’m not sure the overhead to maintain those ultimately is worthwhile. It makes me think back on the old ClarisWorks or FileMaker setup where you ostensibly had an external company that made the product, but it was an Apple subsidiary. They could then offer the product for multiple OS’s. I’m not saying that business model was all that successful, but is there a place for an MS works in the time of Google docs?
Just sayin'
Don't know that I really agree with this. Google does have experimental services and tools that they've killed (RIP Google Reader), but they have always provided migration for their core services. Look at Messaging, for example. Gmail chat -> Hangouts -> Hangouts Chat(?) -> Allo(??) -> Hangouts (again?) -> Android Messages.
The problem is not that they leave users completely stranded, the unending shift from app to app for no good reason is itself the problem.
And to be clear I do think Google is worse at this than Microsoft is. But the important difference isn't over whether they provide a migration path. Forcing your users to migrate every year or two is bad, regardless of whether the migration is handled "well".
Talk to all the happy GSuite/Free users around now. Or people who developed Chrome Extensions prior to Manifest V3. Or who were banned from Google Fi, Youtube, or your app store of choice by an automated, broken algorithm. Or who developed Workspace Docs prior to mandatory security audits at price points which will break most independent developers. Or....
The key difference is Microsoft has exactly 2 or 3 things on the entire list where any users were left stranded. For Google, you're a statistic. If a change breaks 10,000 small businesses, Google looks at the impact on their bottom line, and goes ahead with the change.
Microsoft bends over backwards to NOT do this. AWS as well. It's not that it never happens, but if you've bet on your business on Google, you're basically guaranteed it will happen at one point or another.
My point is that for Google's core services, they generally due try to migrate users to a product that provides the same basic features, but that this isn't good enough. Forcing users to migrate because of pointless churn in your app offerings is already the problem, regardless of whether the migrations are handled well. Google is worse than Microsoft in this area not because they leave users stranded (usually), but because they're constantly switching their focus in products like messaging.
Eventually these "core products" will be abandoned, because let's face it, they are not even core products. Core product for GOOG is ads. And that's the difference.
Try telling that to Picasa users.
When Google announced it was "moving on from Picasa", they stated:
"We apologize for any inconvenience this transition causes, but.... Google Photos is a new and smarter product that offers a better platform for us..."
A better platform for Google. Not users.
Many Picasa users, like my father, were left frustrated and confused by the change. He was not a "cloud user" of anything, and he took lots of hi-res photos and wanted to manage them locally. Picasa failed to install on Windows 10, and some people were even rolling back to Windows 7/8 just so they could keep using the Picasa application.
I hope you don't consider migration from locally controlled photo management to the cloud as "generally the same features", because it isn't.
If you started a business which relies on functionality in Manifest V2, and Google wants to block ad blockers with Manifest V3, you're SOL. If you started a small business which makes Workspace apps for local companies, and Google starts requiring a $50k security audits which are greater than your profits, you're SOL, and those local businesses are SOL. And so on.
There is no migration path, at least which allows you to stay in business. I'm not talking about changing chat clients. I'm talking about Google razing thousands of small businesses to the ground because they don't matter to a $1.8T goliath. All of these businesses were Google's partners in a Google ecosystem, not competitors.
Microsoft -- at least modern Microsoft -- doesn't do this.
This is why I always advise people never to rely on Google for B2B. It's transactional; it's fine for making a quick buck if you've got something you think will make you a mint for a year or two, but it's not fine for building a sustainable business.
Average Android users, maybe had a clean migration?
On iOS (or worse Windows) you had to seek out new apps each time and there was nothing but confusion. Both platforms, at least in the US, have more than their fair share to be considered statistically significant to "most people" and "I need to find and install some new app" is certainly much more friction than "didn't notice the migration happening".
(Not to mention anecdotally, my GChat experience was through XMPP federation and was amazing while it lasted and I entirely got stranded by the "migration" to Hangouts. Everything including my contacts list was in XMPP. I know that I'm statistically insignificant to Google in that transition and statistically insignificant to "most people", but I also wasn't the only person stranded that way.)
> Skype for Business Expiring in over 3 years, Skype for Business (formerly Microsoft Lync and Office Communicator) was an enterprise instant messaging software developed by Microsoft as part of the Microsoft Office suite. It was almost 18 years old.
It’s still around because of a lengthy transition path Microsoft offers and they admit that and then start talking about it in the past tense…
Behind the scenes, it uses SIP and SDP for establishing calls - back in the day at $BigCo, we were developing a software suite for debugging SIP infrastructure, and Skype for Business was surprisingly easy to integrate. Shame that Teams switched to a proprietary Microsoft protocol now.
Is it alive? It very much has an immensely passionate community of students and hobbyists using it in ways well past its intended use (e.g. it's some of the cheapest mocap hardware you can buy). But I don't think you've been able to officially purchase one for 4+ years now. Hard to call that "alive" in a business sense.
Honestly a real shame that Xbox hasn't pivoted it into some other team that can market it towards creators. In particular the whole "VTuber" phenomenon may benefit form a cheap(ish), dedicated motion tracking device instead of relying on a high end iPhone or fanagling with some generic webcam.
Creators will absolutely pay a premium for such tech when the alternative goes for thousands of dollars (a quick google shows these devices selling on the order of 2000 to 7000+ USD). The SDK alone would generate much more value for such a product.
VR definitely killed any interest in the "core" gaming market, but I think the uses of motion tracking is a completely separate audience from VR anyway. Without some dedicated apparel, a VR kit can only track your eyes and hands. motion tracking gives you so much more data to work with, for potentially multiple subjects as well. People working with that data will easily pay themselves back with whatever they develop with it, which is why maybe a licensing deal (similar to Unity/Unreal Engine) may be a better way to monetize .
I'm not offering judgment on whether they ought or ought not to, I'm merely observing that they have power and are exercising it as they choose.
After seeing this site and then the comments here, I am coming out of this with the general sentiment that Microsoft is genuinely thoughtful about addressing end-of-life products.
Their transition into the paid/enterprise space is very interesting. I'm very excited for them to find a non-advertising revenue stream, as it could help Google to stop being evil. They're still a very amazing company.
However, their approach providing free services is a bit subpar. I've ran into so many table-stake bugs that simply don't exist in MSFT offerings (e.g. copy/paste between Google office applications often breaks formatting).
Thanks to our mid-size enterprise contract, I can get someone to tell me that not enough people are complaining about it for them to fix it. Meanwhile, from asking my teams at work, everyone struggles with lack of polish across their applications.
Really nice price too, while being (based on a bit of research) much more powerful than the old Kinect.
You can buy USB cameras from Intel and Logitech with comparable sensor packages to a Kinect.
For Microsoft's hardware efforts that is often seen as its own win when they can take something people don't know they need, package it in a commodity way to get competitors to take interest and build their own versions:
The scroll wheel on the mouse went from an R&D project at Microsoft to the Office team realizing it was the future of productivity and bundling mice with scroll wheels with Office to now just about no manufacturer would think to build a mouse without a scroll wheel.
The Kinect used console gaming as a trojan horse to commoditize thousands of dollars of lab sensors into an integrated $150 accessory to the Xbox 360 and now there are versions of that sensor package in laptops and smartphones and VR headsets and so much more. Kinect as a gaming brand may be dead (for now? AR/MR gaming has always been one for recurring fads, it may come around again, who knows), but the legacy of Kinect lives on in hardware all around us. The hardware didn't just go back to being thousands of dollars of lab equipment, it became part of the computing atmosphere around us. That's an incredibly interesting and weird win that a lot of people wouldn't necessarily credit Microsoft for being such a lever, such an instigator of change/innovation, such a bridge between R&D dreams and "background" reality.
(ETA: Microsoft still sometimes uses the IntelliMouse brand as a bit of a retro-throwback, but the above analogy does help show how much that brand is very related to the Kinect brand. Almost every mouse today is an "IntelliMouse" under the original brand meaning. The brand did its job so successfully to point where people don't even sometimes remember the brand, other than sometimes retro-hardware fans.)
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-tec...
Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on anything related to this.
Nexus line was an Affordable/ value reference implantation of Android
Pixel is an overpriced atrocity marketing platform for Google.
Pixel IS NOT a replacement for Nexus
https://www.theverge.com/2015/9/29/9410551/google-nexus-6p-a...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/google-pixel-review-...
yes that it killing it
I feel similarly about the Google Home Max. Was it really killed in 2020, if the latest version of the firmware came out in 2022? Can we say that Google killed the Pixel 4, since the hardware is no longer being sold but it's still receiving updates?
The inclusion of Angular 1 is also kinda questionable to me. Even though Angular 1 code isn't totally forwards compatible, there is a pretty clear migration path for moving to Angular 2 and beyond
to them, google killed Angular.
Can confirm, Kinect is dead. You can only get them refurbished now, they’re no longer manufactured. The new consoles no longer support Kinect, we had to dig out an original Xbox One for her.
When the Kinect launched, Microsoft had trouble getting a critical mass of players that would attract developers. Without developers adding support to their games, Microsoft had a hard time marketing the device. This led to them bundling it with the Xbox One, but consumers were upset that they were being forced to buy the accessory.
I’m impressed they held out as long as they did, but eventually Microsoft caved and removed the Kinect from the bundle and dropped the price of the Xbox One. At that point, the Kinect was essentially dead. They quietly stopped manufacturing them and the new consoles no longer support them (though I’ve heard rumors you can buy 3rd party USB adaptors).
It’s a shame. That device is SO much more engaging and approachable for kids than trying to teach them to use a controller.
Developers generally disliked it. It just didn't work well as a game controller.
The Wii was much more practical. You still had a controller in your hand with physical buttons, which makes a big difference, and it worked as a fairly accurate pointing device. Those more than made up for the limitations of accelerometer-only motion control.
In the end, couch coop that was pretty essential to the 360 just kind of withered away in the Xbox One era (when games like Halo competing on looks with other consoles decided they couldn't afford the frames/resolution costs of split-screen coop anyway) and that missing "controller number indicator" no longer mattered in the end, but in the original plans of the Xbox One the hybrid Kinect/controller gaming support was key to things like couch coop.
It's still interesting to wonder about that road not taken if more developers had considered Xbox One hybrid Kinect/controller controls more seriously beyond just the few experiments we did see.
I dunno. I had the original kinect for the Xbox 360 and the controls were wonky. A controller might be weird for a few hours but especially kids should be able to pick it up quickly and then it does exactly what you input, unlike the Kinect. However, I have watched multiple girlfriends struggle with 3D controller input so maybe it's just not for everyone and has nothing to do with kids?
Did you use Microsoft Foxpro on Mac? I can assure you MS killed it without a migration path. What about the Zune? MS Money? Microsoft Reader?
XNA (C#) => DirectXTK (C++)
C++/CX => C++/WinRT (back to ATL / Visual C++ 6.0 dev experience)
Form/WPF => UWP (.NET Native / C++/CX / WRL) => WinUI 3.0 (.NET with CsWinRT, C++/WinRT)
.NET Framework => .NET Core
All of them require rewrites, leave relevant use cases behind, at least they leave the lights running for them to still be targeted, which makes many stubborn to keep using the stuff that actually works.
The only reason people stuck with teams is because it was forced upon them by the IT departments who preferred teams because it was bundled in their license. Teams was very very very rough in the beginning, compared to zoom and slack.
Microsoft doesn't have the guts to call things killed off. And it keeps them in limbo forever. To me that's worse than just admitting you should move on. It's fine if they continue to offer it for business continuity purposes, and they would score many big points doing that. But don't claim they offer it at no cost
One ambiguity in all this is what counts as a "product". There have been a lot of things which have disappeared over the years – such as apps bundled with Windows 3.x which have disappeared in newer versions (for example, Reversi or Cardfile) – but which were never sold as independent products, do they count? And what about stuff which is discontinued but has an upwardly compatible replacement – Visual C++ is the successor to the Microsoft C/C++ line going back to the 1980s, in a somewhat similar way VB.NET is successor to the Microsoft BASIC line going back to the 1970s. Microsoft Mail was replaced by Exchange/Outlook, etc. Xenix, OS/2 and LAN Manager were effectively replaced by Windows NT, the POSIX/Interix/SFU/SUA subsystem was effectively replaced by WSL. There are also products Microsoft sold on behalf of third companies, whether rebranded or under their original names (I mentioned muLISP; muMATH and R:Base are other examples)
And what about the software they made for the Apple 2e?
Yes they still sell webcams: https://www.microsoft.com/en-ww/accessories/products/webcams...
I don't think Microsoft had many software products for Apple IIs. A large part of the point of the Z-80 SoftCard was that then their CP/M 8080/Z80 product line would run on Apple IIs, without having to rewrite it for the 6502 CPU. The most notable Microsoft product for Apple IIs was Applesoft BASIC, which was a version of Microsoft BASIC shipped by Apple in the Apple II ROMs (and modified by Apple employees). In terms of Apple II packages Microsoft sold directly, only ones I know of are TASC (The AppleSoft Compiler), a compiler for Applesoft BASIC; and Multiplan.
They wrote more software for the Mac – first version of Excel was released for the Mac in 1985, first Windows version did not come out until 1987 – Excel for Windows 2.x came with a bundled version of Windows 2.x – prior to Excel, Microsoft's spreadsheet offering on DOS was Multiplan. Multiplan ran on a p-code virtual machine–inspired by UCSD Pascal, but using C rather than Pascal as the programming language (or at least later versions did, maybe some early versions actually were written in Pascal)–which made it easy to port to myriad platforms, including CP/M, Apple II, MS-DOS, Commodore 64, Xenix, UNIX, among others. (Multiplan also ran on Mac, on which platform it was a GUI rather than text-mode product; given that, I'm suspecting Multiplan on Mac was a quite different code base from Multiplan on other platforms.)
True, but you can make the same point about much of the more recent software/services on this page – there probably isn't much market for them either. (Surely, if they'd succeeded in the market, Microsoft would not have killed them, so the fact Microsoft killed them is evidence of their market failure.)
The official death date is Jul 14, 2026, however that has been extended 2 times now...
*Microsoft Active Azure Graveyard for Products - Enterprise Edition 2022 .Net
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/edge-ie-mode
[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/
When I first saw the title "Killed by Microsoft" I thought it was a list of products from other companies that Microsoft killed - not products from Microsoft that Microsoft ended.
"Microsoft Graveyard" is a better name given Microsoft's history of killing other companies and their products. Or make the list really products that Microsoft killed. That would be a much longer list.
The only difference is .info vs .com .
I still use Bookshelf 1996 on most days of the week.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bookshelf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta_Webster%27s_Dictionary
You can get the 4th edition for free at https://ahdictionary.com, and it's good. I'm just old-fashioned enough to dislike some of the changes that they made between the third and fourth editions.
I suppose that the ability to run this nearly-30-year-old program with ease is testament to Microsoft's commitment to backward compatibility. And if I wanted, I could probably run it straight from the CD, as people did back in 1996.
1996?
More like 1987: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBupNdYe08g
The interface was beautiful, smooth, modern looking. Whoever designed WP (and Zune) probably deserves a much better place than Microsoft as they were just too good.
I love Apple's design aesthetics in many ways, but still sometimes miss Windows Phone and it's tiles layout and its unique haptic feedback feeling. Not to mention that keyboard was more responsive than iOS too. (iOS is okay, still better than Android, but WP was the best in keyboard for me)
I also developed for WP too, which had a nice SDK though it was too limited. Of course it could expand much more by time. For me personally, using my favorite IDE (Visual Studio) at the time with my favorite language (C#) with XAML syntax was lovely.
Sad to see great potential dead.
Clear text passwords collected and stored in LSASS.EXE long term.
SMBv1
Machines spraying their local user's password hashes all around the network constantly.
LLMNR
Symmetric (password based) authentication.
SPNs with Domain Admin privileges whose password hashes can be queried by any user at any time.
Full mappings of every user, machine, privileged level, authentication metadata, and active sessions available to any user on the network who feels like asking.
Office macros that read/write to the file system and execute shell commands.
Javascript files that can execute malicious shell commands when you try to read them.
DLL hijacking
Very weakly hashed passwords (NTLM) in the domain controller.
Their online manuals that when you try to find something like how to script a very specific powershell event you instead get to read about what powershell is, what commands you could conceivably write, every word that powershell knows, who made powershell, why powershell is so important, how you can get certifications in using powershell, and other functions powershell can do but you cannot find in microsoft's online manual how to specifically write the command you need to write to achieve the specific goal you want to achieve.
For that you have to go somewhere else or figure it out on your own.
Their online manuals are the lexical equivalent to having to memorize the entire World Book Encyclopedia to be capable of ordering a hotdog with mustard.
Very approachable “code only” game engine if you already know C#.
I’ve been playing with it for a hobby game project and so far everything works perfectly on both Mac and Windows which was surprising, didn’t even have to change a build flag or config file just starting debug on Windows or Mac Visual Studio has worked.
Not only that but a random old Logitech controller connected to the Mac worked out of the box with Xbox controller code from Windows.
Then Microsoft forced a Windows 10 update on it, and everything slowed down to a halt. Camera application was running at ~5fps max. Applications started crashing.
Then Microsoft pulled the support for the phone completely, and one by one, applications stopped working altogether, until all I had was a dumb phone with a crappy camera and a crappy web browser.
It's a shame, really. If they had made it an open platform and allowed users to install Linux, I believe it would have taken over the world.
Didn't they, though? With Maemo and later Meego (though maybe I have that swapped)?
As it turns out the developer power just isn't there.
That's not to say that that wouldn't be the case now, but at least back then, it wasn't able to survive.
I was so incredibly excited for my Nokia N900, but at the end of the day it was not a phone running Linux, but a buggy OS with a buggy phone app.
This problem is even worse now. We're back where we started in ~2000 with Windows.
It blows my mind you can buy Huawei phones for $1000+. The feature phone I bought for $50 literally disintegrated in my hands after a couple months of use.
Towards the end of its life with me, it would soft reboot whenever someone called me.
https://mobilesyrup.com/2014/08/14/ex-nokia-exec-tomi-ahonen...
There are great links at the bottom of that page to Tomi Ahonen's exhaustive coverage of Microsoft's destruction of Nokia's lucrative, profitable business model.
They prioritised hardware over software. Maintained multiple OS’s. Made lots of stupid derisions.
You are entitled to your opinion that Nokia was somehow "on its way down before Microsoft" but the facts are that Nokia was profitable and had products that were award-winning but never saw the light of day thanks to Stephen Elop's blundering and Steve Balmer's meddling. Ahonen laid down those facts back then. For anyone wishing to have a fuller, rounder understanding of Nokia's demise under Microsoft, take the time to delve into those links at the bottom of:
https://mobilesyrup.com/2014/08/14/ex-nokia-exec-tomi-ahonen...
Maybe they’ve changed, but their strategy seemed to be to take something already dead, give it a jolt and Weekend at Bernie’s it under a new name until it starts to smell, then give it a jolt…
E.g. , plays for sure, Zune Music, Groove music, Xbox music. Also Communicator, Lync, Skype, Teams etc.
I used to use Zune with music pass every day. Thinking about that interface now reminds me of my first job and working on startups in my spare time -- probably the happiest and wildest time of my life. Like most of my generation MSN Messenger was another I used every day. That reminds me of school, friends and teenage heartache. Windows Phone 7 was the OS of my first smart phone. It reminds me specifically of being 19, sitting at my girlfriend's kitchen table playing angry birds at 3am while eating a bowl of cereal. Windows Media Center reminds me of the hot summer nights I'd spend at my teenage girlfriend's house watching films on her XP MCE computer.
- I argue Kinect was 5+ years ahead of its time and marketed towards the worst possible market: gamers who want precise control of their content. motion tracking software with a built-in voice recognition sounds like something that could have been Alexa years before Amazon every bothered.
- Silverlight was in many ways a better version of Flash in everything except actual content delivery. But in the mid 2000's with limited hardware and networking, that was one of the most important steps.
- Mixer was a very ambitious attempt to try and create a competitor to video streaming that Twitch had long dominated by the time it launched. But it further seems to cement a harsh reality of modern social media; at a certain critical capacity, the only undoing of one has to be itself.
I still remember Nat Friedman here in the comment section saying he won't stop developing Atom. He didn't even keep on his promise for a week.
I could build a low-spec PC with a cheap case, slap a bunch of drives in a JBOD configuration, install the backup agent on all my machines and things just worked. Restore files from a few months ago? Go for it. Do a full-metal restore over the network? Sure, why not. It had many ahead of its time features like media streaming, health monitoring, and could act as a remote access gateway. It never failed me and was almost zero maintenance.
I was very saddened when it went end of life but the writing was on the wall when the follow-up “Vail” release was announced. It essentially took away nearly everything that made the original so good - no more media sharing, JBOD support was out, and it ended up being little more than a super watered down Windows Server 2012.
Literally every other backup product I’ve tried for Windows - from paid commercial offerings from Acronis and too many others to name, to the built-in File History never failed to let me down when I really needed it. File History in particular has been a constant disappointment - it’s just shockingly terrible and I have absolutely zero trust for it. It can just go for months not backing up files and never even bother to alert the user. Unacceptable.
(I will concede that Caves & Cliffs is finally going in the right direction but the Java client still sucks re: optimisation and it'd be nice if they put some effort into that instead of the PR puffs of mob votes, etc.)
If they could implement some of the low hanging fruit that would be a fantastic step but Mojang seemingly have zero desire to seriously tackle performance.
Killed almost 19 years ago, iLoo was a smart portable toilet integrating the complete equipment to surf the Internet from inside and outside the cabinet. It was 13 days old.
lol
VSTA (visual studio tools for application). C#/VB.net integrated IDE which was meant to run in parallel to VBA (and I think ultimately replace it).
Microsoft Solver Foundation: an abstraction over in house and commercial solvers (Google OR Tools is a neat similar effort by the way)
* Windows POSIX Subsystem: WSL has similar features, but not exact what the POSIX Subsystem is.
* Windows OS / 2 Subsystem: Killed.
* Multipoint Server: Killed in server 2016.
* Hyper-V RemoteFX
* WDS boot.wim deployment: Killed in server 2022 and Windows 11, although MDT provides a much better solution.
* TFS: MS wants you to use Azure DevOps.
* Hyper-V Server: The free ESXi alternative. MS wants you to use Azure, so it is killed with the release of server 2022.
* Microsoft Security Essentials: Killed in Jan. 2020, and its signature updates will stop in 2023.
* Windows CE: Replaced by Windows IoT
* Aero: Such a beautiful effect. Killed in Windows 8.
WSL1 is exactly a Linux subsystem. Why do you think POSIX subsystem is needed today?
Haven't tried it recently so cannot remember the features they dropped, but was damned annoying. Wunderlist was fine. MS Todo was basically the same without some key features that I used.
I gave up on it considering the developer timescale was snail pace...
How tf do the big boys get "todo" so wrong?
Google completely fluffed Google Tasks ... despite it having some really impressive features like "add email to tasks", best implementation I've seen of it. Which is a shame as the rest of the To do app is not worth anyones time.
MS as well ...
/endrant
I have weird enough needs I was planning to use an open source CalDAV server, OS native clients and local push notification app for the parts the native apps don't support... but the FOSS CalDav server space is kind of rough right now.
Microsoft Edge is better than ever. They killed the last vestiges of Trident, and good riddance. And… they didn’t even kill that if you consider IE mode will survive for at least another decade, and no announcements have been made about the underlying code in Windows which will probably survive as long as COM and Win32.
Also, Microsoft Reader originally was for ebooks, it was released initially in Aug 2000. I remember it being one of the few ebook reader apps before Kindle was more commonly available.
And Microsoft Expression was created from existing software: Frontpage, Visual Studio, Creature House and iView Media all contributed to the original products. They were discontinued after a deal with Adobe to sell apps on the Microsoft Store, if I recall correctly. It wouldn’t surprise me if Microsoft asked Adobe to not make cross-platform app-building tools (e.g. Flash RIA and Flex - last released in 2012 at about the same time) in exchange for Microsoft not making creative tools. Both were feeling threatened by the other.
Sad.
I called for them to give up on Internet Explorer and fork Chromium almost 8 years ago here on HN. I’m glad they did it but the one mistake is that they modified Chromium too much. I now get annoying prompts to scan for coupons and other ways to save money that don’t actually work.
My comment from almost 8 years ago:
I dont know most of this entries in the list, but I can name like 5 things google has "killed" that I actually liked. Iam still pissed they buried reader.
https://github.com/fabianoriccardi/killed-by-microsoft is not a fork, but it has many of the commits from https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle
The earliest commits from fabianoriccardi include git messages like: > replacing "Google" with "Microsoft", removed PressCoverage
Anyway, great code recycling at least right? It's a fun thought that the author of killedbygoogle ultimately wrote most of the code on killed-by-microsoft.
Contributor summary: https://github.com/fabianoriccardi/killed-by-microsoft/graph... https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle/graphs/contribut...
I agree that it is cool to see how it's been reused. :)
"Just" is a severe understatement, especially because they switched to the monoculture.
1. Google launches a new product, which gets promotions for everyone involved because launching new products is what the review and promotions process is optimized for.
2. Nobody maintains the product because that's not how you get promoted.
3. The product is discontinued.
Sometimes they'll have similar products that do similar things replace each other. So I wonder if anyone at Google secretly uses this site as a source of ideas for new products to try and launch.
Microsoft is a polar opposite: they kill unpopular things, monetize popular things, and provide ridiculously long support (and backwards compatibility).
The subpar game library is another.
That's one flimsy ass lawsuit. Upscaled 4K for some titles ( admitted by Google themselves) is still 4K.
For the game library, did Google promise they'll have every game on it? What promise was broken? They worked with game developers directly, paying to get games ported ( be it indie or Ubisoft/EA/Rockstar). They should have done more, but it's not like Stadia was advertised as "the platform you can play all games on" and then it turned out you only have 20 games.
StreamDeck 'sort of' offers some of what SideShow promised. And 3rd parties have stepped in for Gadgets.
This was during a time when gizmos like the Chumby existed, and had a lot of potential for being ambient information displays, but alas the market never took off. And now devices like the Echo Show still don't live up to the potential.
I never owned it, but the Children's Museum in Indianapolis used to have a copy running at a kiosk.
I believe it was absorbed into Encarta.
I tried to Skype with relatives recently and the application ground my (recent, powerful) machine completely to a halt. It was insane.
The Silicon Valley satire over google being a place to rest and vest is very very real.
Teams is good but the experience is still not great compared to Slack.
Same on mobile. They had windows mobile evolved for so long, only to be overtaken by Android and iOS.
https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-micros...
When the product was killed, I lost contact with a lot of old friends who weren't online as much.
Basic features still work:
https://support.xbox.com/en-GB/help/games-apps/my-games-apps...
I'd say teams is a rather comic implementation of chat... or, hmmm, perhaps more like tragic.
All Killed by Microsoft/Google/Other projects should be required to open source them.
I clutch my heart, and weep every time I think about this.
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</html>- SharePoint
- VBA
- Office
Nothing as dangerous to your developing product line as that "one-trick-pony" keeping the company afloat, who wants to get in.
Then again, you can get that R&D for cheap, when it inevitable crashes and burns and the developers leave the company disillusioned.