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.
The Azure Kinect was released as a successor for the research and business applications[1]. I know one roboticist who has used one, but no one aside from that. Definitely dead as a consumer gaming device, but a product evolving towards a discovered usecase is a surprisingly happy outcome from MS.
When I saw "Killed by google" I came out of it with a general sentiment about how google can't commit to a specific roadmap.
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.
Google is experimental. We're both the product and research subjects, not customers, for their free offerings.
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.
Also a lot of the sensors that Kinect brought to market first and a lot of very Kinect-like sensor packages have just made their way into mainstream usage. Any device with "Face ID" or "Windows Hello" support owes a lot to Kinect and uses a comparable sensor package to the first gen Xbox 360 Kinect (though usually a much shorter depth of field because it's just doing facial recognition rather than full room recognition).
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.)
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?
Also, it's still being sold as a product to the one market where it really was popular (researchers and hobby enthusiasts). That's not quite the same thing as being dead.
I think Kinect's technology of projecting infrared dots to figure out depth has been surpassed by better stereoscopic vision and lidar. I think. For example I know that Intel has a $400 desktop stereo camera and a $600 lidar puck which would definitely be the way I'd go nowadays for any projects. Kinect also had the body skeleton stuff built in, but you literally can get a JavaScript Open CV script to do that now.
I don't really get it, it's just a product that has gone off the shelf. The xbox 360 isn't 'dead' it's just no longer sold. I don't think the kinect is any different in that sense, seeing as no new games use it.
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.
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 .
Yes, someone else pointed it out to me. Thanks, it oddly doesn't show up at all when merely searching "kinect", so maybe that's my search engine bias's fault for being gaming skewed.
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".
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
It would have had a chance if they didn't screw up MSN and Skype which were both incredibly successful communication tools among teens and 20 something.
Everybody was on MSN. Everybody was on Skype.
Once whatsapp and facebook messenger mobile started taking place it was already N years too late. Now in 2022, they have no chance.
But that is not Microsoft's target market. They sell business oriented productivity tools. Only recently have they started having a consumer oriented gaming products which is still a small list of products around Xbox console platform
When Teams came out it didn’t have feature parity with SfB, despite their claims that it did, but here in 2022, it does. At least I can’t think of a sing feature in SfB that’s not in Teams now, and can think of many features that have been radically improved. Never used consumer Skype too much, what are you missing in Teams now?
SfB saved conversations to outlook, that way it had a great search. Unless I’m missing something, Teams does not do that, and the built-in search is a complete joke (you get single message results with no way to read all the context).
My experience with the saved convos in Outlook from SfB was kinda hit or miss, but you're totally right. Teams doesn't even try. Or I suppose, Teams does store your chat history in the mailbox, but it's not in a folder that's user accessible anymore. I'm sure reasons include driving users to the Teams interface. But it then begs the question about why I still have that empty folder in my mailbox structure.
- 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.
MSN Messenger is on the list.
In the Apps part and in the middle column.
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.
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.
- Notifications will continue to trigger for chat threads of meetings I’m no longer a part of, for teams I’m no longer in.
- 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.
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...
Well, at least with Teams you can use the web app, for Zoom has to be installed, and at least under Linux it's a complete train-wreck. Incidentally, I have the issue with 100% CPU usage during video calls with Zoom, while Teams (in the browser) works just fine.
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.
AFAIK, Zoom can "run in the browser" in the sense that when you click a Zoom link it prompts you to install a "Zoom Launcher plugin" which is for all intents and purposes a binary application that you install locally. I wouldn't call that "running in the browser". Or has something changed recently?
Pretty sure it’s always been the case it can run as WebRTC in the browser. They make it hard to find, but if you reject all their crapware there is a link to just continue in the browser and join a zoom.
Select text and Ctrl+C without release mouse button always make me rage. It copies entire message rather than selected text. I've never seen this behavior on windows apps.
I prefer the somewhat focused approach of skype, rather than the multi-channel type kitchen sink used by teams.
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)
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.
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.
Webex, really? Didn’t the zoom people leave Cisco to make a better Webex? The only people I know still using webex are the feds. Honestly I don’t have issues with teams voice and video, it seems largely commodity at this point, though zoom certainly talks up their ability to maintain quality over crummy connections.
Apple uses Slack and WebEx. The experience is so disjoint and WebEx itself is so crappy that I actually prefer Teams overall even though Slack is a better chat client.
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.
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.
Search through messages doesn't give any context or even let you jump to the context. Very unresponsive scrolling. Notifications have been unreliable for me.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
We might as well be from different species :) I'd love it if you could elaborate. How do you chat with coworkers remotely if not slack.. IRC? phone? Go around to their house?
The context of the discussion here is about Microsoft Teams. Teams doesn’t have a particularly engaging or enjoyable or usable design, but it does provide the bare minimum chat functionality.
Even shitty Microsoft Skype isn't as bad as teams. Skype never just held onto messages without delivering them. Teams can't even do the core thing it's supposed to do correctly - send messages.
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".
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.
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.
> "they generally do try to migrate users to a product that provides the same basic features"
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.
Picasa taught me to not trust Google and yet I kinda fell for the "unlimited backup of your photos" in "photos". Which were unlimited until it weren't. And now my storage is full and Google is repeatedly threatening to drop emails because they share the same storage.
Okay, maybe. This was years ago when my dad complained about it not working. I installed FastStone Image Viewer as a replacement (what I use), but he preferred Picasa.
I will check that out, thanks for mentioning it. I've been low-key sweating about the potential loss of Picasa since it's been unmaintained, but aside from maybe the iPhone photo editor, I have never seen something as easy to use. And honestly, in my opinion, Picasa still has a slight edge over the modern iPhone editor...
No, all of these were places where uses were left stranded.
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.
That's a shallow distinction. The constant migration is because internally teams are abandoning projects. Whether another team picks up a similar project is a secondary process, and may not happen, then you have a killed product. This is a completely different process than a company deciding to go in a different business direction or making a technical decision to change.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
During Windows Phone's lifetime devices were rarely left un-upgraded or out of security support. Not quite as well as iOS, but much better than the Android situation. Arguably it was one of the reasons that phone carriers chose to kill Windows Phone because they seem to like being able to micromanage the tire fire that is Android Updates and Windows Phone was too "uppity" for them.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Likely they don't kill them because they have customers and have contracts stating support for X years.
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.
Yes, their proprietary scalable video codec is what makes the difference.
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).
True but I believe Skype P2P mechanism is dead end on current computing environment. Few companies like Microsoft can host servers for such free services.
There is https://www.opensilver.net/ Not sure if any is MS contributed. And I’m not sure I can recommend it as a platform. 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.
Honestly some of the things that website includes seem a bit wacky to me.
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
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.
> 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.
In the early Xbox One days there was a lot of experiments with hybrid controls where you'd still have the controller in your hand, with its accurate joysticks and physical buttons, but have the Kinect sensor for body posture and facial expression and gestures out and away from the controller (and voice recognition). The SDKs had a bunch of interesting things about controller recognition matched to other data. The OS itself would do things like pick out which controller a specific person was holding, and could use that for sign in (among other things). The Xbox One dropped the "controller number ring" from the 360 because it could tell what person was holding the controller rather than needing to signal vice versa which controller a person should hold. There were some interesting Kinect party games that took advantage of this or nearly took advantage of this (hybrid games where maybe everyone would set down controllers for a mini-game and it wouldn't matter that everyone picked up "the right" controller back when the next controller section started).
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
Your migration from .NET Framework to .NET Core required a rewrite?
Unless you are doing low level things, I doubt. All ours library and apps survived the migration without a rewrite.
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.
the skype > teams migrations was a costly endeavour for many companies. Sure on paper they give continuity by offering similar services, but in practice the cost to switch to teams is about as high as switching to whatever other solution on the market (Zoom in pole position).
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
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)
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)
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.)
I wish MS would actually kill InfoPath... not they keep in this is quasi life support mode that is broken 50% of the time but still listed as "supported" with a 2013 client that breaks all the flippen time..
The official death date is Jul 14, 2026, however that has been extended 2 times now...
> 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.)
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ahonen's data was highly accurate and was being presented in a very compelling way in real time as the Microsoft-Nokia shitstorm was unfolding. He had already left Nokia years earlier so didn't have any direct skin in the game, but he did have an uncanny record of mobile phone industry insider knowledge, data, and contacts inside Nokia, Apple, Google, Samsung, Motorola, and a long list of carriers worldwide. The reports he generated were considered the "bible" for executives.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Until I lost mine in a taxi it was easily the best, most polished and most reliable phone I've ever owned. More reliable than any iPhone I've owned. More reliable than any droid I've owned. In terms of calls connecting, not dropping out, the OS not crashing in the middle of calls - all of which have happened to me with Apple and Google's (Samsung's) gear. That was my experience that I'm having as hard a time reconciling with yours as you probably are with mine.
Hey, me too! I got myself a Huawei feature phone, probably their first offering in the North American market.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My unconventional take: The early death of Home Server before the concept could really take hold is the most disappointing loss here. I often think modern computing could be superior today had more consumers become comfortable with home servers rather than relying on public clouds.
Home Server was an excellent product - probably one of the best Windows backup solutions I’ve ever used.
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.
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.
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.)
There's some significant gains from available mods and while they couldn't hire one of the most prolific modders in that space I can't imagine it would be insurmountably difficult to hire someone with the relevant JVM or OpenGL expertise to really clean up the game.
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.
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.
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.
Microsoft only sabotaged, then bought Nokia's mobile phone division. The rest of Nokia is doing fine making networking equipment and various other things.
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.
To play the devil's advocate, at a large company like Microsoft, it's healthier when products are allowed to fail. Otherwise, new projects will get vetoed because of maintenance risk
Not listed here is the most important product Microsoft has made IMHO: Microsoft 3D Movie Maker^, which I and my buddies in junior high had a lot of fun with in the 90s.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wunderlist was acquired and killed because it would have been better than Microsoft Todo. They promised to implement a few features and pocketed some customers.
Microsoft Todo was started by the Wunderlist team. It was a ground up rewrite for whatever reasons made sense to that team at the time, but Todo didn't exist until after the Wunderlist acquisition.
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.
Let's not forget Sunrise calendar, which Microsoft purchased and supposedly integrated into Outlook. I miss Sunrise calendar so much... I've yet to find an alternative that reads from other calendar services and task managers so well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hi! Creator of Killed by Google. The code that runs Killed by Google has always been licensed under MIT, and it's changed significantly since the Microsoft version was cloned. There are multiple 'clones' that have popped up over the years using my repo as the base, and Fabiano is one of the few who kept my license in tact. The Microsoft version has been around for over a year, I think.
I agree that it is cool to see how it's been reused. :)
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.
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.
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).
> The suit, originally filed back in October 2020 and moved to a New York federal court last week, alleges that Google, alongside developers Bungie and id Software, stated that the Stadia service would feature 4K resolution support, but did not walk back or correct this statement once it was openly reported that Stadia was upscaling several titles from resolutions such as 1080p and 1440p, rather than offering “true” 4K resolution.
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.
They are no longer making their own games or even trying to make it into a viable consumer product. They pivoted to a B2B product. It's only a matter of time before they just kill off the consumer-facing version.
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.
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.
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.
Lync, Skype, Skype for Business, Teams, and probably few more intermediate apps. Practical diversion of corporate communication. Many people stuck to Lync as it had been working surprising long until it stopped, then folks started to use Skype but every time the wrong version of it. Now Skype is dead and MS reinvents video calls from scratch.
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.
Microsoft should have never killed MSN messenger. It still blows my mind that Microsoft went through evolution of so many chat apps only to be overtaken by Slack as the business chat app.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
After 20 years, i used up my cache of MSTE's. I've found the "Elecom M-HT1UR" to be a suitable replacement, the only issue i have with it is the "wheel button" actuations are all too close together. "wheel click" is also "wheel left/right" too often.
Streamers were offered contracts to exclusively stream on Mixer, and they all moved back to Twitch (or YouTube Gaming) after the contracts were up. I assume Mixer didn't have enough critical mass to keep people on the platform and MS shut it down.
A "content" tag claims "A full list of dead products killed by Microsoft
in the Microsoft Cemetery" but all I see is metadata and a javascript
tag. Where is the content?
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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?
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.
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.
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.