
Discontinued Microsoft Products - tech-historian
https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-microsoft-products
======
wongarsu
Picking random products from the list:

\- Microsoft Chart: now just a feature of Excel \- Microsoft Works: seems like
you can just replace it with MS Office? \- Windows Photo Viewer: virtually
identical to "Photos" on Windows 10, apart from the new UI framework. \-
Microsoft Cobol: superseded by Visual Studio which apparently also supports
Cobol? \- Microsoft Frontpage: apparently replaced by Microsoft Expression
Web, which is itself discontinued \- Microsoft Encarta: I have good memories,
but in the age of Wikipedia probably not very profitable \- Microsoft DVD
Maker: Kind of sad, but I don't remember the last time I burned a Video DVD

I guess this helps explain why nobody really feels like Microsoft is
deprecating a lot of products. Most things on this list are either replaced by
something better, not relevant anymore or never really found a market.

~~~
tech-historian
A few things:

Windows Photo Viewer: Indeed, Microsoft has had several iterations of image
viewers over the years. They all have nuances and pros/cons. But in the end,
not everyone was happy about the "upgrades." WPV was deprecated and articles
like this showed up: [https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-get-windows-photo-
viewer-...](https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-get-windows-photo-viewer-back-
in-windows-10/)

Works: Works was a free (with new PCs) entry-level office suite. MS Office is
of course not free. They are completely separate product lines that happen to
share some (but not all) file formats.

Cobol: I believe Visual Studio only supported Cobol starting in 2015. That's a
~20 year absence from the original.

The list shows deprecated products that didn't have a specific drop-in,
straightforward upgrade path for the end-user.

~~~
cosmie
MS Office the desktop software isn't free, but you can use the online versions
for free[1]. Considering the Works was never quite at feature parity with Word
anyway, the gimped down version of Office Online is a decent alternative.

You also have the benefit of not having inconsistencies in file formats, which
was always frustrating when working with Works and trying to edit files from
Office.

[1] [https://products.office.com/en-us/free-office-online-for-
the...](https://products.office.com/en-us/free-office-online-for-the-web)

~~~
loosescrews
Works was actually a completely separate codebase from an acquisition, and, as
a result, many common features actually worked differently from Microsoft
Office. This was problematic as it made upgrading from Works to Office
difficult as many people who used Works were used to Works and found Office
unfamiliar. I have been told by more than one person that they preferred Works
to Office over the years.

------
mwattsun
One of the Mac Works coders here: A slight correction. Works for the Mac was
published in 1986, not 1988.

AppleWorks for the Apple II was written by Rupert Lissner of Scotts Valley, CA
for Apple Computer. AppleWorks was released early in 1984 and was written in
6502 assembler. At that time, Steve Jobs was really anxious to have software
on the new Macintosh computer that would make it appealing to business users.
Lissner and Jobs discussed porting AppleWorks to the Macintosh.

Lissner teamed up with former IBM salesman and Apple exec Don Williams of
Santa Cruz, CA to begin work on the Mac version. Don Williams was the creator
of Desktop Plan and Graph'N'Calc for the IBM PC. Their company was named
Productivity Software. Within months, AppleWorks became very successful so
Lissner decided he didn't need to work on the Mac version. He dropped out
without writing any code.

At that time I (Michael Watson) was hired as their first employee. Williams
then hired Brian Haas to write the word processor and Tim Lundeen to write the
spreadsheet. I wrote the database. Lundeen and I wrote the core code to
integrate the modules. Later, Ben Halpern was hired to write the drawing and
charting code. We wrote it in 68000 assembler and called it "MouseWorks."

In 1986, Bill Gates visited us in Santa Cruz and a deal was struck where
Microsoft would publish our program as Microsoft Works for the Macintosh.
Microsoft was working on Excel for the Mac, but it wasn't ready and they
wanted something on the Mac.

Lundeen dropped out before it was published in a dispute with Williams. Haas,
Halpern and myself finished it up. It was published in the fall of 1986. We
did two more versions, then Microsoft bought us all out and took over in 1993.

AppleWorks for the Macintosh by Apple was called ClarisWorks and became a
competitor, although not a significant one.

~~~
tech-historian
This is great background, thanks so much for sharing! Good history lesson
here.

~~~
mwattsun
Thanks. I hope this helps future historians who are curious.

------
eindiran
For comparison, the total killed products here: 343, since 1975. That's about
7.8 per year.

Killed Google products: 194, since 1996 [0]. That's about 8.4 per year.

So all-in-all, Google isn't doing _that_ much worse.

[0] [https://killedbygoogle.com/](https://killedbygoogle.com/)

~~~
Nition
It's not the same because Google's products are all (or at least mostly?)
services, whereas many of the Microsoft products listed are simple releases
with no continuing support required for them to still work (e.g. 3D Movie
Maker).

"Killed" (can't use it anymore), vs. "Discontinued" (might stop working on new
operating systems at some point in the future).

~~~
aylmao
This is actually a great point, and one thing that has me skeptical of Stadia
and other upcoming game-streaming services.

People who never got rid of their NES can still play their games. If it
breaks, they could buy another one, or maybe even try to fix it themselves.

Once a service shuts down, you don't really have anything to keep or to
revisit. If there was a Stadia-only game in the future, could you somehow get
a copy and run it on local hardware to keep playing if Stadia shut down? Could
you do it easily.

Super Mario Bros, Classic Tetris, etc. they still have active communities of
speed-runners, tournaments, etc. It's kind of weird that something with the
level of cultural impact a videogame can have could all of a sudden disappear
because it doesn't exist anywhere but in a centralized space outside the
control of the people who experienced it.

~~~
skyyler
Sometimes I feel like removing ownership from the consumer is the goal of
moving everything into a subscription service.

~~~
Spooky23
Software developers have discovered that people are bad at measuring value and
they are bad at delivering additional value over time. Subscriptions always
cost more and force a decision every year.

I play Super Mario brothers on my old Nintendo every couple of years. No
revenue has been realized since 1986 or whatever. Just a payment for the NES
and game.

Today, you can get unlimited access to virtually all music made in the last
century or every show made by Disney ever for less than a subscription to some
goofy text editor.

~~~
pjmlp
And even better they can grab a pile of FOSS software, hide it behind their
paywalls and don't give a neither a dime, not code back.

------
Negitivefrags
I have a hard time beliving that this one is real:

[https://www.versionmuseum.com/images/discontinued/discontinu...](https://www.versionmuseum.com/images/discontinued/discontinued-
microsoft-hardware/discontinued-microsoft-hardware%5E2003%5Emicrosoft-iloo-
illustration.jpg)

~~~
nostromo
"The project was announced by MSN UK on April 30, 2003, and was widely
ridiculed before being declared a hoax by Microsoft on May 12. On May 13,
another Microsoft press release stated that although the project had not been
a hoax, it had been cancelled because it would do little to promote the MSN
brand."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILoo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILoo)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20030705022312/http://www.europe...](https://web.archive.org/web/20030705022312/http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=16337)

------
disconnected
What, nobody mentioned Microsoft Bob yet? :)

That thing was terrible, but I'm kinda sad that a Microsoft Bob-like window
manager (or whatever you want to call it) never panned out.

Yes, it blows for productivity, but it had "personality" \- it was colorful
and silly unlike your average UI today which either looks "industrial" or
subscribes to the "everything is flat and bland" school of thought.

Oh well. Here's to you, Bob:

[http://toastytech.com/guis/bob.html](http://toastytech.com/guis/bob.html)

Edit: Ninja'd by
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21776932](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21776932)

~~~
sedatk
> it was colorful and silly

You misspelled inflexible. :)

------
rosybox
> Visual FoxPro (1992-2007)

Tell that to the thousands of businesses still using it.

[https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=foxpro](https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=foxpro)

~~~
EvanAnderson
The majority of county boards of elections in Ohio are using a voter
registration management application that is still written in Visual FoxPro
(and still uses DBF files as the back-end).

Aside: It has a recently-added ToTP implementation that replaces their prior
"scan a barcode" system of "two factor" authentication. Of course, you can
just open the DBF files directly in another tool and manipulate them w/o any
"authentication". The mind boggles.

~~~
mikestew
Direct DBF manipulation is small potatoes. Since the database container (.DBC)
has to be writable to be of much use, use that same tool to add some triggers
that will run whatever FoxPro code you want (which can call just about any
Win32 API you want). If you’ve got FoxPro installed, skip the hex editor and
open the DBC like a table (it is a DBF). If one is going to use DBFs, skip the
database container feature if you can. It was a good idea maybe 25 years ago
(umm, not really), but it was a different time and long before Microsoft
started getting their security shit together.

—

Former Fox team member

------
miohtama
Microsoft Comic Chat, never forget

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat)

~~~
Yhippa
Someone is still making comics out of them:
[https://www.bonequest.com/](https://www.bonequest.com/). Very NSFW. I
remember reading these in college and shocked it's still around.

------
thrower123
The more irritating thing Microsoft does is churn on their SDKs. I think there
are at least a half dozen different ways I can generate a SOAP client from a
WSDL, for instance. Or some of the abortive and competing UI layers; UWP vs
WPF vs WinForms vs ATL vs MFC and so on.

Silverlight was probably the most painful. I've known some companies that made
big bets on that technology, and most of them were caught flat-footed when it
was announced that it would be discontinued.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Libraries to read XML: 3 at least

------
vorpalhex
I still sorely miss Microsoft Money and have found Quicken/et al to be
terrible alternatives. Any recommendations? Strongly prefer offline entirely,
and would be happy if it's cross-platform and can import standard bank
statement exports.

~~~
larrybud
I'm a happy user of Moneydance:
[http://moneydance.com/](http://moneydance.com/) Offline (but can download
from banks or import files) and cross platform

------
thedaemon
The frustrating bit to me is when they bought up Creature House Expression (A
Vector art application)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_House_Expression](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_House_Expression)
rebadged it as a Microsoft product and then killed it. It was a really great
vector tool in it's time. Buying up software companies and then killing the
software is a problem we rarely talk about. AutoDesk has also done this with
Softimage XSI, which, ironically Microsoft used to own as well.

------
tr352
One interesting discontinued Microsoft product missing in this list is Xenix.

------
Yhippa
Two things stood out to me: I really liked Sunrise and nothing seems to have
done a good replacement of it. The other thing is that I really miss the
Windows 95-style UIs for some reason. The UIs were generally responsive and
the tooltips popped up quickly. I miss bland highly ordered rows of icons.

------
jxramos
They have a youtube channel apparently, I'll have to check it out when I get a
chance.
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDYfttV26QFApHJnMG6U1zw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDYfttV26QFApHJnMG6U1zw)

------
kick
I tried a few deeper cuts, and wow, this is really thorough! Has anyone
noticed anything they missed?

~~~
wvenable
Windows 10 S seems odd as you can still purchase products, brand new, that
have it. So how is it discontinued?

~~~
mikewhy
Windows 10 "S edition" has been discontinued, in favor of Windows 10 "S Mode".
What the distinction is, I'm not sure.

~~~
wvenable
A lot of these disconnected products have pretty much direct replacements with
slightly different names, same functionality, and probably even data
continuity. Or were hardly separate products to begin with.

~~~
tech-historian
Which ones? Products are only on the list if they didn't have direct
descendant drop-in replacements that were straightforward for the user to
upgrade.

------
JoeAltmaier
Doesn't mention Platform Builder, a tool for creating embedded projects. Just
a wizard really, stapled onto an old version of Visual Studio. Didn't do much
- select from a very limited list of drivers and chip support to start your
project.

------
bovermyer
Windows Live Writer! I remember that. I actually miss it; it was a great
desktop UI for WordPress.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
It’s been open sourced now:

[https://github.com/OpenLiveWriter](https://github.com/OpenLiveWriter)

------
euroclydon
I still use Microsoft Money every day. It’s great! There’s nothing like it
available now. Runs on the desktop, no internet needed. All data stays on my
machine. Ledger, scheduled bills, and cash flow forecast are all I need.

------
skissane
Appears to be missing "Microsoft Delta" version control system.

Also Microsoft's pre-Excel spreadsheet offering, "Microsoft Multiplan".

Also missing Xenix.

Isn't clear how they define "product". For example Cardfile is listed but that
was never a standalone product just a program bundled with Windows. If they
are going to include discontinued Windows components, there are a lot of
those. (And discontinued components or features of other products too, like
Office or SQL Server.)

------
Yuioup
I see that IronRuby is there. They should also add IronPython to that list.
That has been dead for a while now. It hasn't progressed since version 2.7.9
from 2018.

~~~
sterlind
which is a darn shame. I think the lack of cffi support really hindered
IronPython from catching on. the marshalling of data types was incredibly
smooth and pleasant to use, and it was quite performant, but cffi is an
indirect dependency of so many Python libraries that I couldn't use it for
much besides "hello world."

------
amwelles
I still miss Sunrise. Outlook calendar doesn’t compete last time I checked, so
I’ve been using Fantastical plus some other integrations for special calendar
subscriptions.

------
bynkman
Microsoft Bob (1995-1996), R.I.P.

------
rhengles
The MS product I miss the most is Midtown Madness 2, with San Francisco and
London. It was the best city racing game I ever played, it had the best game
mechanics, it was fast but easily maneuverable, games nowadays require hard
training to run one minute without hitting into something. The maps and cars
available were very entertaining and I remember freely downloading a lot of
vehicles of very different types.

~~~
h2odragon
Agreed. MS Combat Flight Sim 2 also hit that sweet spot of "just felt right"
that few if any others managed.

------
fuball63
The one that caught my eye was 3D movie maker. When I was young my siblings
and I really had fun with it.

Basically there was a background, and you could add characters to it and make
them move, rotate, scale, and do premade animations. Then you'd add music and
sound effects. It seemed very cutting edge to us at the time.

------
oflebbe
Somehow Xenix is not mentioned

------
macintux
My local Children's Museum had a PC running Musical Instruments for years. I
loved playing around with it; easily the only Microsoft software I've ever
felt strongly about (in a non-negative way, anyway).

------
ChicagoDave
They should open source the Basic 7.1 compiler and push to make it cross-
platform. It was procedural, but super fast. Also not interpreted. It compiled
and linked, just like a C compiler.

------
danbolt
I've heard from relatives that Microsoft MapPoint made a good tool for road
trips. I always wanted to try it.

------
PeterStuer
Microsoft Infopath, still one of the best examples of how bad marketing can
doom even the best product.

------
Angostura
I still remember my annoyance when Entourage was replaced with the vastly
inferior Outlook for Mac.

------
sahoo
Give us clippy back.

------
reiichiroh
I don’t see Microsoft Songsmith on the list.

------
Legogris
How about QBasic?

------
GuiA
List seems inaccurate/incomplete.

E.g. Courier is on it, but Courier was never more than a design concept video,
so considering it a "discontinued" product is off.

Similarly, no mention of the original Microsoft Surface - a 30 inch tabletop
computer that shipped from 2008 to 2011.

~~~
tech-historian
The original Surface table was renamed to MS PixelSense and it's in the list:
[https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-
micros...](https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-microsoft-
developer-products#s28)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense)

