[HN Gopher] Killed by Microsoft
___________________________________________________________________
Killed by Microsoft
Author : sandebert
Score : 266 points
Date : 2022-03-27 18:16 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (killedbymicrosoft.info)
(TXT) w3m dump (killedbymicrosoft.info)
| folli wrote:
| Any suggestions for alternatives to Microsoft Academic? Google
| Scholar is ok, Researchgate sucks, and I'm wondering about any
| other such services which I might not be aware about.
| thomasahle wrote:
| Agreed, Microsoft Academic was a super useful tool, and I
| haven't seen anything as good.
| tester756 wrote:
| ILoo
|
| 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
| Minor49er wrote:
| I guess they realized that it was more economical to put the
| crap inside of the software rather than the other way around
| jbullock35 wrote:
| Missing: Microsoft Bookshelf [1]. Encarta was a somewhat similar
| product, but the reference sources in Bookshelf were arguably
| better. For example, Bookshelf contained the unabridged American
| Heritage Dictionary, while Encarta used (I think) a Webster's
| dictionary [2].
|
| 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
| glitchc wrote:
| Unless you have a Windows 3.1 vm kicking around just to support
| this, that seems unlikely.
| jbullock35 wrote:
| No need for a VM. I'm running Windows 10. Setup is easy if
| you still have a drive that can read CDs: just mount the ISO
| (for example, with ImgBurn), copy all of the files to your
| SSD, and run AAMSSTP\APP\BSHELF96.EXE. The registry is never
| touched, so it's a very portable installation.
|
| 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.
| goblinux wrote:
| What line of work are you in where you're using this tool
| regularly? Curious to know
| jbullock35 wrote:
| I'm a professor. I write a lot, and I use Bookshelf 1996
| mainly for the third edition of the American Heritage
| Dictionary, which is great. The interface is better than the
| interface for the iOS app.
|
| 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.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| How I miss MSN Messenger. They had it so right, until Skype.
| shitlord wrote:
| I have fond memories of a group chat with my internet friends,
| complete with custom emoticons and file sharing. It might have
| been called "Windows Live Messenger" at that point.
|
| When the product was killed, I lost contact with a lot of old
| friends who weren't online as much.
| johnisgood wrote:
| It was beautiful! My childhood's best IM, apart from IRC.
| internet2000 wrote:
| Did a google engineer write this?
| TrevorFSmith wrote:
| Ah, to have loved and lost. Such is life.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > Microsoft Comic Chat
|
| I'd say teams is a rather comic implementation of chat... or,
| hmmm, perhaps more like tragic.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| "Nokia" should get its own entry.
| weberer wrote:
| Microsoft only sabotaged, then bought Nokia's mobile phone
| division. The rest of Nokia is doing fine making networking
| equipment and various other things.
| frays wrote:
| What happened to Mixer? I remember some huge names like Ninja
| going over to it.
| RachelF wrote:
| I miss CodePlex, there was much useful source code there, and
| most of what I'm looking for now has not been migrated anywhere.
|
| Sad.
| foolfoolz wrote:
| many of us have been in a spot where we are working on some code
| that's out of date compared to the rest, is used by almost no
| one, and makes no impact for the business. yet we maintain
| because we have too. and we wish someone could be brave enough to
| just kill it. i've been at a few jobs where i would have been
| happy to see a graveyard like this
| seanhunter wrote:
| No mention of FoxPro? I remember going to some sort of expo and
| winning a copy of visual FoxPro in a big box with lots of manuals
| and all the software on floppy disks.
| 300bps wrote:
| Would like to see the product that Microsoft replaced the killed
| product with. For example; Edge isn't dead. It just got replaced
| by a fork of Chromium.
|
| 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:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7909383
| BoumTAC wrote:
| It's missing Atom editor, it was my favorite text editor, now
| it's abandoned to death on github. They stop working on it the
| day they bought Github.
|
| 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.
| MarcellusDrum wrote:
| I recommend Kate by KDE. Great editor.
| seanw444 wrote:
| Atom is the only Electron app I'm a fan of. Even VS Code is
| pretty meh in my opinion. I wish it continued to receive
| significant updates and performance improvements, and
| maintained a lot of the user share still. It would be awesome
| editor. Nowadays, Emacs is a wonder. If what you want is a
| "hackable text editor for the 21st century" then Emacs delivers
| on that very well.
| [deleted]
| sswaner wrote:
| Wasn't there also a Groove that was a collaboration tool build by
| Ray Ozzie?
| ThrowawayB7 wrote:
| Needs entries for their Natural Keyboard Pro, still the best of
| their split keyboard implementations and the Natural Keyboard
| 4000, which was a close runner up.
| yuuta wrote:
| Also:
|
| * 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.
| virgulino wrote:
| I really miss Microsoft Systems Journal, Microsoft Internet
| Developer, and MSDN Magazine.
| kypro wrote:
| I miss a lot of this stuff. It's odd the emotional attachment I
| have to software. It's almost like how pictures or smells take
| you back to moment in time, thinking about old software does that
| for me.
|
| 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.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I'm not sure I'd say I miss any of these personally. But
| looking back with hindsight, I do see it as a shame that some
| of these products failed.
|
| - 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.
| smitty1e wrote:
| Immortal:
|
| - SharePoint
|
| - VBA
|
| - Office
| danielovichdk wrote:
| BizTalk
| silisili wrote:
| Am I the only one getting a DNS error here? Tried link and www.
| ctragena wrote:
| h2odragon wrote:
| the Trackball Explorer and the Sidewinder Force Feedback joystick
| should get entries.
| wkearney99 wrote:
| MSTE is my daily-driver, I've stocked up on spares in the event
| of failures. One had been so regularly used it's worn the paint
| off where my palm rests on it. NOTHING comes close it's
| excellent design (and I've got a bin FULL of pretenders-to-the-
| throne).
| ineptech wrote:
| Not killed exactly, but I hate what they've done to Minecraft. It
| used to be something kind of unique, a game experience that was
| universal among kids. They paid $1.6B to gate it behind a
| microsoft.com account and force schoolkids and school districts
| in to the MS ecosystem.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Plus the mob votes - stupid nonsense idea. You're the game
| devs, dev the game. Don't ask an easily influenced bunch of
| people (hello glow squid) for their opinions.
|
| (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.)
| ModernMech wrote:
| Zune is on there twice. Speaking of Zune, I loved it. I know it
| got a lot of shit for being an also ran against the iPod, but it
| was a seriously solid media player and I found it better than the
| iPod in many ways. Zune software was always gorgeous, had an
| innovative subscription model (you get to keep some DRM free
| songs every month forever, even if you cancel the sub. Wish
| Spotify did that.) and felt innovative compared to iTunes, which
| looked like Excel for music.
| ILMostro7 wrote:
| I wish I had kept my Dell DJ.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Digital_Jukebox
| dustinmoris wrote:
| I didn't realise that Internet Explorer Edge is dead?
| [deleted]
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| RIP Microsoft Comic Chat. The true loss to humanity!
| dpweb wrote:
| Still like/use MS Money. Strangely the lack of updates or support
| means nothing.
| esel2k wrote:
| Is it really that bad? I believe if there is no alternative and a
| need then there will be a software at some point. I guess it is
| pure economics and I personally miss none of these.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| I don't think this (or these) list(s) are aiming to shame MS
| (or Google) for shutting down products, only to catalog and
| preserve the history.
| ILMostro7 wrote:
| Arguably, the names of these lists imply a level of blame; or
| at least evoke emotion from potential visitors. But, that's
| the name of the game these days.
| smt88 wrote:
| The Google list is absolutely aiming to shame Google. They
| break promises they made even just a few months earlier
| (Stadia is a recent example).
|
| Microsoft is a polar opposite: they kill unpopular things,
| monetize popular things, and provide ridiculously long
| support (and backwards compatibility).
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Stadia is still alive afaik.
| sofixa wrote:
| What promise did Google break with Stadia?
| dvtrn wrote:
| _Encarta_
|
| I clutch my heart, and weep every time I think about this.
| trulyme wrote:
| Lync is getting killed? Nice! Can we please take care of Teams
| next?
| ryan-duve wrote:
| I like seeing the list of services, but I wish it was called
| "Microsoft Graveyard" instead of "Killed by Microsoft". Some of
| those wouldn't be around today regardless of the controlling
| organization, such as Silverlight and Encarta. To me, "Killed by
| Microsoft" makes it sound like Microsoft chose to discontinue a
| product that otherwise would still be "alive" today.
| detritus wrote:
| This does feel like a somewhat bilious [anti-?]fanboy counter
| to the Google Graveyard website.
| 13of40 wrote:
| I get a bit of a "This food is _so horrible_ and the portions
| are _so small_! " vibe from it.
| gundmc wrote:
| Is the Google Graveyard not itself bilious?
| Thorrez wrote:
| The HTML <title>, site header, and domain are all clearly made
| to parallel https://killedbygoogle.com/
|
| The only difference is .info vs .com .
| _3u10 wrote:
| MS Graveyard is exactly how they'd name it too lol. Well done.
|
| *Microsoft Active Azure Graveyard for Products - Enterprise
| Edition 2022 .Net
| Mindless2112 wrote:
| It isn't even fair to say that some of these products are dead.
| For example, you can still use Microsoft Streets & Trips today,
| as it's from an era when you bought (rather than rented)
| software. It's just not getting any more updates, so its
| usefulness diminishes as the road network changes.
| rvba wrote:
| Microaoft Edge continues too, it just switched technology
| jchw wrote:
| EdgeHTML really _is_ dead, however, and that has
| significance considering it was an independent browser
| engine (also, one that applications could embed)
| sedatk wrote:
| Edge is still IE11 compatible[1] and still provides an
| embeddable component (WebView2)[2].
|
| [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/edge-ie-
| mode
|
| [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-
| edge/webview2/
| jchw wrote:
| That doesn't really change the fact that what was called
| EdgeHTML is gone and it was replaced by a program that
| has an _entirely_ different lineage, API, user interface,
| feature set... I am definitely aware of WebView2, I even
| maintain bindings for it for Go!
| karaterobot wrote:
| Yeah, there should be a KilledByApple website that includes
| Zune.
| maire wrote:
| Your point is well taken. Apple got a few good blows back at
| Microsoft.
|
| 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.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Add to the list:
|
| 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)
| blablabla123 wrote:
| I like how they had all this software with a lot of entertainment
| value. Probably the list could be made much longer, e.g. there
| used to be Microsoft Dangerous Creatures and 3D Pinball
| px43 wrote:
| Things _NOT_ killed by Microsoft:
|
| 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.
| __s wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILoo
|
| ??
| can16358p wrote:
| I really miss Windows Phone. It was a great alternative to iOS
| and Android and I used it for years (Omnia 7, then Lumia 920)
| until I switched to iPhone as WP was into inevitable demise by
| Microsoft.
|
| 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.
| ratsmack wrote:
| That list looks like mostly like Former Microsoft products. What
| about all of the great products that were absorbed and dismantled
| by Microsoft, like the fantastic visual database called Formbase.
| paskozdilar wrote:
| I was gifted a Nokia Lumia 640 when it just came out. It was a
| nice phone, it had good hardware, it was fast and worked
| smoothly. It had all the applications I needed and honestly
| thought that it was gonna take over Android, given Nokia's
| reputation and popularity of 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.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Some background reading on Nokia's demise under Microsoft:
|
| 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.
| megablast wrote:
| Nokia was on its way down before Microsoft cane along.
|
| They prioritised hardware over software. Maintained multiple
| OS's. Made lots of stupid derisions.
| julianlam wrote:
| > 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.
| harry8 wrote:
| Wut? N900 was the best, most reliable, highest quality and
| most polished phone I have ever owned. It's not even close.
| How they f.ed that up is beyond me.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| The big problem was just app support. Everyone was writing
| apps for Android and iOS and maybe Windows or Symbian, but
| that was about it. Since many of these apps aren't
| something you can re-create yourself (WhatsApp, banking
| apps, whatnot) so that hugely diminished its usefulness,
| especially since this is when everyone and their mother was
| using WhatsApp, which never made a Maemo app.
|
| This problem is even worse now. We're back where we started
| in ~2000 with Windows.
| harry8 wrote:
| People write apps for platforms with the largest market
| shares, apple & droid. Not news. N900 never got the
| support to get market share. It could have though, the
| quality was there and they had a huge selling point. If
| it did the world would be a better place with better
| software on your phone and less spyware. Not what we got
| though, huh? We got Apple and Google in the race to who
| can smash the userbase harder with no meaningful
| alternative and fringe phones trying to catch up to where
| the 900 comfortably was a decade ago. Apple and Goog are
| both looking at each other and thinking "You guys doing
| that and actually getting away with it? Amazing! Well
| we'll just go even further!" And the only place where
| customers rights or welfare is ever even remotely served
| is where it happens to align with smashing a competitor
| and is absolutely incidental to their strategy beyond
| some marketing. It's nuts. The N900 was better in every
| single way, polish, stability everything. Got smashed by
| executive decision. You could build conspiracy theories
| around it if we didn't have such a rich history of total
| and complete incompetence to draw on and be a more likely
| explanation.
| zokier wrote:
| N900 was really cool device in many ways, but polished or
| reliable it definitely was not; when I had one, I tended to
| carry a feature phone along with it because N900 was so
| ridiculously buggy and unreliable.
| [deleted]
| zozbot234 wrote:
| AIUI, you _can_ physically install Linux on the Lumia phones,
| they 're not locked down in any way. It's a matter of hardware
| support.
| penteston wrote:
| https://killedbygoogle.com/
| emrahcom wrote:
| FoxPro
| entropie wrote:
| Is there a similar list for google?
|
| 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.
| mdoms wrote:
| RIP Google Inbox.
| seanw444 wrote:
| I definitely miss Inbox. I still to this day type in
| inbox.google.com to go to Gmail, even though it simply
| redirects me to mail.google.com. Just a habit.
| ro_bit wrote:
| https://killedbygoogle.com/
| philwelch wrote:
| From what I've heard, Google's product life cycle is
| basically:
|
| 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.
| entropie wrote:
| It was so easy that I could have thought of it myself.
| Thanks.
| rvba wrote:
| The "killed by microsoft" site looks like a rip off of the
| well known "killed by google" site. Id day that they really
| try to push fake controversy and extend the list e.g.
| Microsoft Edge just switched its technology and still
| exists.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Microsoft Edge just switched its technology and still
| exists.
|
| "Just" is a severe understatement, especially because
| they switched to the monoculture.
| Marcus10110 wrote:
| It's not just a rip-off, it's build directly on top of
| the killedbygoogle repository!
|
| 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/killedbyg
| oogle/graphs/contribut...
| paulpauper wrote:
| but is anyone really mourning the loss of Bob?
| mattkevan wrote:
| I didn't think Microsoft killed things.
|
| 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.
| ntkachov wrote:
| Ya, it seems less that they killed it, and more so they just
| rebranded or released a successor product. Microsoft mobile
| wasn't killed, it was replaced by windows phone.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Replace is just euphemism there. Nothing about Windows Mobile
| was in Windows Phone (which was also killed).
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Good list - but I don't think Windows 10 IoT Core is dead. It's
| been renamed to just Windows IoT Core, but otherwise it is still
| quite available.
| lstamour wrote:
| I had to object to a few of these too. If you need an Office
| viewer, you can just download the office apps - unlicensed,
| e.g. on an iPad, you can read office files just fine.
|
| 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.
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| OneNote not being able to use local files is annoying as hell.
| axpy906 wrote:
| I had no idea Edge got discontinued.
| majewsky wrote:
| This is about Edge with its own engine, not Edgium.
| hamiltonians wrote:
| Shouldn't the Zune store, software, and Zune phone be combined as
| one failure?
| macintux wrote:
| The only Microsoft software I've ever really enjoyed using:
| Musical Instruments (https://archive.org/details/microsoft-
| musical-instruments).
|
| 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.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| How did microsoft academic compare to researchgate/google
| scholar?? Very sad I only hear about it now... I mean it's so
| absurd that people care enough to build websites like killed by
| microsoft and killed by google but yet no one built a alive by
| microsoft and alive by google. Where can I find an exhaustive and
| succinct/bullshit free timeline of their products launches +
| short, to the point description?
| user_7832 wrote:
| Microsoft academic was imo much better. Instead of just
| entering words into a text field, you also had tags like
| biology or chemistry that you could include or exclude. Sure
| you can manually do that even now with say Scopus but the ML
| stuff was really handy. Google scholar doesn't have any such
| tags or topics fields unfortunately.
| weberer wrote:
| https://about.google/intl/ALL_us/products/#all-products
| skissane wrote:
| So many discontinued Microsoft products not listed: Xenix,
| Microsoft OS/2, Multiplan, Microsoft COBOL, Microsoft
| Fortran/PowerStation, Microsoft Pascal/QuickPascal, the classic
| Microsoft Basic line (BASIC/BASICA/GW-
| BASIC/QuickBASIC/QBASIC/PDS/VBDOS), MS-DOS, MSX-DOS, Microsoft
| Adventure, Microsoft Decathlon, Z-80 SoftCard, Microsoft Delta
| (the version control system), Windows NT OS/2 subsystem,
| Presentation Manager for Windows NT (an add-on which allowed you
| to run OS/2 1.x GUI programs on Windows NT), FoxPro, Visual
| FoxPro, Visual Test, Microsoft File (the classic MacOS database
| app), Microsoft Mail/Schedule+, Microsoft LAN Manager, Microsoft
| Services for Netware, Visual J++, Visual J#, Microsoft Money,
| Microsoft LISP (actually reselling muLISP, which Microsoft
| earlier had sold under its own name), InfoPath, Entourage,
| FrontPage, Vizact, Object Packager
|
| 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)
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| Microsoft, contrary to the name, writes a lot of software!
| ______-_-______ wrote:
| Maybe "Micro" refers to the support window
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Macrosoft aquisition may be in their future
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Nice list! You forgot Microsoft hardware, too. Do they still
| make webcams? The Z-80 soft card?
|
| And what about the software they made for the Apple 2e?
| skissane wrote:
| I did mention one hardware product in my list - Z-80 SoftCard
| (expansion card for Apple IIs which had an embedded Z80 CPU
| so they could run CP/M software)
|
| 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.)
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| There were at least two video games published by Microsoft
| for the Apple 2 series: Microsoft Decathalon, Microsoft
| Adventure, maybe others.
| MikusR wrote:
| Announced last week.
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/22/22990673/microsoft-
| surfac...
| pc86 wrote:
| How many of these would there even be a market for? Some of
| these are _games_ from the 70 's and 80's.
| zuminator wrote:
| Even so, if they included the dubious "Iloo," there should be
| at least be room for the once fairly popular Microsoft Money
| on that list.
| skissane wrote:
| > How many of these would there even be a market for?
|
| 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.)
| campl3r wrote:
| I miss windows phone
| Kuinox wrote:
| Contrary to Google, Microsoft often provide a migration path to
| another of their service covering the same usecases.
|
| 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.
| kerng wrote:
| Agreed. Microsoft is really good at back compatibility -
| sometimes even to a fault.
|
| 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.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Google only sold Nexuses and Pixels, which compare favorably
| to the Kin phones.
| SomeBoolshit wrote:
| There was also MSN messenger, which was more capable than Skype
| other than the connection to the actual telephone network
| (having messages be delivered later without requiring both
| people to be online at the same time - amazing!) and when Teams
| replaced Skype, even more features were dropped. What part of
| that is positive other than "well, you can still do _some_ of
| the things but we prefer to give you an inferior product ".
| kungito wrote:
| Lets be honest, no Microsoft messaging platform had a chance
| to be a 2022 whatsapp/messenger competitor. They were smart
| to realise that and focused on their Slack alternative for
| businesses which they can package with the rest of Office
| package. And with the new EU regulation on the way it makes
| even less sense
| passivate wrote:
| Also, if you have access to the executable then you can use it
| indefinitely (with obvious caveats).
| mnd999 wrote:
| Teams is unbelievably shit though. It's like they don't even
| care.
| zapnuk wrote:
| Yes! Teams is by far the worst "popular" software i've ever
| used.
|
| 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.
| rr808 wrote:
| Still better than Skype though.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| The login experience is the worst of any app I've used.
| Stop asking me every day to login, and god help you if
| you're in multiple orgs. I pretty much do the web app at
| this point. Thankfully my org mostly uses zoom and slack,
| but customers on teams refuse to experience normalcy and
| demand everyone experience their pain, same with webex,
| come on people...
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| The sysadmin experience on Windows is hot garbage, too. I
| assume the people writing it have had less than no experience
| dealing with deploying software to fleets of PCs, hot-
| desking, VDI, RDP farms, etc. It's ridiculously inefficient.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > It's ridiculously inefficient.
|
| You mean that simple tasks take many billable hours?
|
| Hmmm ...
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Irresponsible use of disk space, CPU cycles, and network
| bandwidth is more what I'm referring to. I've scripted
| some cleanup of profiles to take care of disk space
| exhaustion in a couple of situations. Cleaning up after
| Teams hasn't been a revenue generator for me, but it has
| created complaints. Anything that causes me to receive
| complaints from users draws my ire. (I subscribe to the
| "sewer system" theory of sysadmin for end-user facing
| servers, desktops, etc. You never think about your
| municipal sewer system unless it has problems. Ideally
| that's never. User-facing IT infrastructure should be the
| same.)
| philwelch wrote:
| Slack is much better as a corporate chat app, but I'm not
| sure that's necessarily good in the broader picture because
| I'm not sure you want to maximize chat engagement in a
| corporate setting. There are weird cultural effects to that,
| and paradoxically having a shittier app for that might get
| you the benefits of being able to chat with your coworkers
| and ask them questions without the weird social effects.
| Andys wrote:
| and if the team consists of remote workers?
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Teams is in the realm of software forced on an entire company
| by clueless executives who are easily swayed by sales conmen
| on complimentary golf/ski trips, so they don't have to
| actually care about making it a good experience - a
| perfunctory checklist of barely-functional features that look
| good on a powerpoint is sufficient.
| bayindirh wrote:
| For what it's worth, Teams feel like it's haphazardly glued
| together from what's laying around, esp. in Linux.
|
| 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.
| iratewizard wrote:
| I can't name a single messenger with worse user experience.
| coolspot wrote:
| Try Skype?
| jhasse wrote:
| After Microsoft took over, yes.
| Keyframe wrote:
| Chat/teams itself yeah, compared to slack; and it's
| mostly/only UI related. Video and audio is leagues above
| however, and recordings integrated with Stream works like a
| charm. It's unbelievable how shitty audio and video is in
| slack however. If microsoft got its UI/UX game, it's easier
| to get that right than the other way around.
| spockz wrote:
| Have you tried other tools? Discord, zoom, webex have way
| better audio and video quality and include video sharing.
| FaceTime has superb audio and video but no screen sharing.
| creativenolo wrote:
| What about Teams makes you think that?
|
| 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.
| floucky wrote:
| Copy/Paste code often doesn't work for me, especially SQL.
| There is a dedicated component to do that, but that's not
| convenient at all.
| Siira wrote:
| https://paste.gnugen.ch/paste/E2o9
| Thorrez wrote:
| https://killedbygoogle.com/ contains Nexus. That was clearly
| replaced by Pixel.
|
| Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on anything related to
| this.
| salmo wrote:
| Came to say the same. The vast majority of these were
| superseded by new products or their feature set was absorbed by
| other tooling. Back office was one of the worst examples. It
| became baked into Windows Server except Exchange.
|
| 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.
| AstroJetson wrote:
| I liked Works. It ran on much less hardware than the Office
| Suite did. The much lower cost was a big deal too. The
| reduced feature set was never a big deal, it's not often that
| I need to put reverse video blink in a Word doc to be
| printed.
| mbreese wrote:
| It was probably too much overhead to support Works. You'd
| still need an engineering team to support Works, and it
| wasn't a big money maker. Much better to put some Office
| features behind a compiler/licensing flag and support one
| product with different "home" and "professional" SKUs.
|
| 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?
| blagie wrote:
| LibreOffice >> Works.
|
| Just sayin'
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| My oldest kid is just aging into gaming. We've got the
| Disneyland Adventures game and a Kinect for her.
|
| 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.
| bluescrn wrote:
| > When the Kinect launched, Microsoft had trouble getting a
| critical mass of players that would attract developers
|
| 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.
| ascar wrote:
| > That device is SO much more engaging and approachable for
| kids than trying to teach them to use a controller.
|
| 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?
| taspeotis wrote:
| Yeah like:
|
| > 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...
| andylynch wrote:
| Parts are older still. The group chat in later versions of
| Skype for Business originated at UBS in the nineties by way
| of Mindalign.
| Fissionary wrote:
| It's kinda sad that they're killing SfB.
|
| 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.
| simfree wrote:
| Trouter (Microsoft Teams routing software for video calls
| and voice calls) crashes and fails to parse SDPs every day,
| even from Teams clients. I swear it is the least reliable
| session border controller we interact with, every 2 weeks a
| new software version is rolled out and new things break
| while tickets about bugs we filed with Microsoft continue
| to go ignored.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Kinect => It's not dead ???
|
| 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.
| jannes wrote:
| There are still games coming out with Kinect support (Just
| Dance 2022)
| ______-_-______ wrote:
| I'd call it dead I guess, but I don't see why that's a
| problem. It's a physical product, you can't keep
| manufacturing those forever. They supported it until the next
| generation of consoles came out. Would it be fair to make a
| site called "Killed by Nintendo" and list the Game Boy and
| Wii?
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| There isn't much money in selling to creators? And the niche
| the Kinect had with active gaming has been reliably filled by
| Meta/Facebook/oculus's quest, it's too bad Microsoft didn't
| explore that more deeply.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Likely not, not in its current form. I wouldn't be
| surprised if in 2010 that Kinect was being sold at a
| significant loss (as is the usual trend in the games
| industry). They'd need to tweak the device quite a bit to
| be B2B, but given the success of game engines, asset packs,
| and other tools I don't think it's impossible.
|
| 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 .
| antaviana wrote:
| I remember reading in Steve Jobs biography that when Larry Page
| became CEO of Google for the second time he reached out to
| other CEOs in the industry for advice on being a CEO. Jobs
| advice was to get rid of all the myriad of products and only
| focus on 3 or 4 key things. If I'm not wrong, spring pruning
| started with Page as a CEO.
| shireboy wrote:
| Came here to make this point. Also, killing off products is not
| unhealthy. I for one am glad that eventually someone had the
| sense to kill off Bob. Sometimes- like for devs invested in
| Silverlight- it can be frustrating, but no reason to keep
| inferior or outdated products afloat.
| neon_electro wrote:
| I came away with the same conclusion reading this and the
| Google sites, but I do feel like these sites nonetheless do a
| public service aggregating and organizing this kind of
| information, even if it feels pointed at MS/Google
| specifically.
| adzm wrote:
| I wish more things like Silverlight were open sourced for the
| community at EOL.
| shireboy wrote:
| There is https://www.opensilver.net/ Not sure if any is MS
| contributed. And I'm not sure I can recommend it as an
| approach. I never quite bought into XAML over HTML/CSS/JS.
| I've done both, and just would rather build a web app than
| XAML for most of the type things I build.
| ripley12 wrote:
| Yeah, sometimes I wish MS would be a little more aggressive
| about killing off products. There are a few developer
| technologies that are in an awkward no man's land: just
| barely supported without much of a future, but MS won't _say_
| that so it makes for a lot of confusion if you're new to the
| space and wondering what technology to use.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I am still salty about how badly they ruined Skype, though.
| mickotron wrote:
| Skype was amazing until it was acquired.
|
| Would Zoom even exist today if Microsoft never bought
| Skype?
| [deleted]
| bscphil wrote:
| > Contrary to Google
|
| 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".
| DoctorOW wrote:
| I feel like your example disproves more than it proves. The
| difference between Micrsoft Edge and Edge Chromium was that
| one day you launched the browser and it looked/worked a
| little different. Using Google for chat on the other hand is
| still extremely difficult because there is no clear path (as
| indicated by all your question marks) who is to migrate where
| and when they're supposed to do it.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| This isnt really true though. For the main use case (IM and
| VC), Gchat -> hangouts -> chat/meet is pretty
| straightforward. Heck most people probably didn't notice
| the migration happening!
| blagie wrote:
| Nope. I've been left stranded by Google over and over.
|
| 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.
| bscphil wrote:
| I think you're lashing out at Google for a variety of
| different (and very good!) reasons, but they're outside the
| range of my comment. People getting banned from Google
| services because of broken automation is bad, of course,
| but it has nothing to do with the issue of whether
| migration paths are provided when services are sunsetted at
| Google.
|
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Good point. Remember how easy it was to migrate off Kin? Or
| Windows Mobile?
| moooo99 wrote:
| I am really looking forward to the day Skype for Business
| finally dies forever. We introduced Teams a few years ago in
| our org. Back then it was lacking some of the features
| frequently used in Skype, so you'd have to keep both. Now,
| years later, about half of the org is still using Skype for no
| apparent reason. I don't particularly like Teams, primarily
| because of the excessive resource usage, but it is still better
| in every way.
| tootie wrote:
| Minecraft Earth never really got out of beta, but I thought for
| sure it was going to be a hit. The fact that it died makes me
| think AR is just never going to take off. Pokemon Go was 5 years
| ago and we haven't seen even a better novelty act since then.
| wkearney99 wrote:
| Don't forget Desktop Gadgets, Sidebar and the hardware auxiliary
| screen Windows SideShow.
|
| 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.
| danielovichdk wrote:
| I miss movie maker, live writer and windows phone.
| randerson wrote:
| Movie Maker (sort of) lives on as "Video Editor".
| mdoms wrote:
| Movie Maker was great. There is in fact a little-known useful
| video editor built into Windows 10 and 11 called Video Editor
| (previously was only available through the Photos app for some
| reason) but it doesn't hold a candle to Movie Maker.
| valdect wrote:
| movie maker was simple and useful
| jbullock35 wrote:
| Some very old Microsoft games are also missing. Example:
| Microsoft Decathlon.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Decathlon
| LightG wrote:
| Feature request.
|
| All Killed by Microsoft/Google/Other projects should be required
| to open source them.
| cschep wrote:
| A lot of these pieces of software were terrible! RIP to the one's
| people miss I guess but.. man. I don't miss a lot of those.
| D13Fd wrote:
| It's funny how, reading this list (unlike the Google list), I see
| very few products that I really miss. Maybe Encarta and Kinect.
| dleslie wrote:
| Microsoft Works was an amazing piece of software. Always
| incredibly fast, with a small footprint, and had enough features
| to satisfy most personal and business needs.
| [deleted]
| xyst wrote:
| and this site was killedbyhackernews.info
| farmerstan wrote:
| What about killed by Google? I haven't seen any product
| enhancements in Nest or Waze in YEARS. It's the same goddamn
| product when so much more could be done. I feel stupid for going
| so in on Nest and seeing nothing enhanced whatsoever. Not even
| the video access has improved.
|
| The Silicon Valley satire over google being a place to rest and
| vest is very very real.
| neogodless wrote:
| Not to detract from the tool, but is it crowd-sourced? Moderated?
| Saw some repeats with a few altered details. Things like Zune and
| Microsoft Reader.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Games for Windows Live belongs there. When that service went down
| took a lot of online games that depended on it with it.
| jnwatson wrote:
| Huh, I didn't realize they ended that.
| Pxtl wrote:
| I mean sort of? They still offer Solitaire and Minesweeper on
| the store, but they're games with an annual fee to remove the
| ads. Which is utterly revolting, of course.
| daveoc64 wrote:
| It's a common misconception that Microsoft closed the Games for
| Windows Live service.
|
| Basic features still work:
|
| https://support.xbox.com/en-GB/help/games-apps/my-games-apps...
| Pxtl wrote:
| Regardless, there are many games on Steam that depend on GFWL
| that require herculean efforts to get to even _run_ because
| they 're looking for API endpoints that no longer exist.
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| They killed solitaire.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| FYI MonoGame is the continuation of XNA and is still used for
| game development, pretty sure Stardew Valley was made using it.
|
| 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.
| Hello71 wrote:
| Stardew Valley originally used XNA, then used MonoGame for non-
| Windows compatibility, then switched to MonoGame entirely last
| year.
| whoopdeepoo wrote:
| Skype is alive in name only
| tester756 wrote:
| I've been using it for the first two years of Covid's WFH
| smt88 wrote:
| The underlying technology is not Skype anymore.
|
| I tried to Skype with relatives recently and the application
| ground my (recent, powerful) machine completely to a halt. It
| was insane.
| throwaways85989 wrote:
| But can it run windows while on life-support? Can we shove the
| core-feature we wish for down its throat to kill it faster? Can
| we put windows on a tablet, or phone-GUI we wish we had a market
| for into our os?
|
| 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.
| tryptophan wrote:
| Wunderlist is still alive as Microsoft todo though isn't it?
| mdoms wrote:
| I think it's a totally different product? Could be wrong
| though.
| LightG wrote:
| It seemed to be a rebrand or rewrite ... but it was never the
| same and I gave up on it.
|
| 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
| chefandy wrote:
| I'm evaluating todo apps and most of the easily accessible
| opinion/info is shitty listicles or shitty YouTube self-
| help gurus. Out of curiosity, what were the key dropped
| Wunderlist->ToDo features? I do hear a lot of people
| appreciate the MS ToDo "My Day" feature and know a lot of
| people were annoyed by the switch, but assumed it was a
| general distaste for MS rather than specific features.
|
| 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.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| It's different, might be a rewrite (since it took it a while
| to reach feature-parity), but the general idea of being a
| simplistic to-do app was kept.
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