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Discontinued Microsoft Products
- danbolt 7y agoI've heard from relatives that Microsoft MapPoint made a good tool for road trips. I always wanted to try it.
- eindiran 7y agoFor 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/
- pwinnski 7y agoMany of the Microsoft products continued working after support ended, or were replaced by something else with the same functionality. Google's products stop working completely, and are rarely superseded. They just go away.
- corodra 7y agoYea, but going through the list, a lot of the products are vain rebrands. Some of which still exist in one form or another. Some haven't exactly died either, they were just absorbed into "bigger" products. Though, RT being put out to pasture.... I had to develop an app for that arbitrary lockout piece of trash. Whoever thought of RT and whoever approved it, deserves a life-long raging case of crabs and... like... a monthly visit of dysentery.
- tech-historian 7y agoThe list specifically lists products that didn't have a specific drop-in upgrade path. So the rebrands are different products that users had to make a decision about purchasing their successor (if there was one) or go with a competitor.
- catalogia 7y agoAt least some of these products had free replacements, or replacements that were bundled with future versions of windows. Microsoft Internet Explorer is on the list, and I'm pretty sure its replacement (Edge) costs nothing.
- kick 7y agoI feel as if Microsoft has released overall far more products than Google, though I don't have a resource on hand to substantiate that claim. I think the statistic is only valuable if it's killed-per-released product.
- filoleg 7y agoMight be worth comparing the ratio of killed products vs. supported products as well, instead of just the absolute number for the number of killed products. I dont have any data to back up this assertion, but i have a feeling that this ratio would differ very significantly between Google and MSFT.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Nition 7y agoIt'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).
- 8ytecoder 7y agoSome of the products in that list also got superseded by better tools with different names.
- tech-historian 7y agoTrue, but Microsoft has plenty of these too. Look at the specific list of retired Microsoft websites and services. There's a lot of them (69 to be exact): https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-microsoft-sites-and-services https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-micros...
- Nition 7y agoI don't disagree. Just seemed a bit unfair to lump Microsoft's whole discontinued list in with Google's killed list.
- aylmao 7y agoThis 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.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tech-historian 7y agoThat's an interesting statistic, but it's difficult to compare the two apples-to-apples. Most of Microsoft's discontinued products cost actual money to purchase. Most of the Google discontinued products were free. In addition, many of the Google products listed are essentially acqui-hires. Products with limited user base. Microsoft has very few of those. So if you wanted to really do a full analysis, those would be some things to examine. It would be really interesting to see.
- close04 7y agoYou’re painting this in a very biased light. When MS discontinued Software X people who paid for it could maybe even use it to this day. Some of that software was also a one time release with no maintenance to speak of. And most other pieces of software just had the functionality rolled into a bigger suite (with or without a gap in between) because it made sense. Comparing this to killing a service is not a fair way to put it. The fact that they were acqui-killings as a justification or consolation is a bit of a stretch. The difference between killing a service and abandoning (discontinuing) a product is not just one of semantics, it’s huge.
- tech-historian 7y agoI disagree with your premise, but even then... Microsoft has discontinued lots of online services too! Almost 70: https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-microsoft-sites-and-services https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-micros... Big companies cancel things. Priorities change, opportunities shift. It happens.
- close04 7y agoYou're correct, they did discontinue/killed a lot of stuff. I just noticed you insist on painting them in a much worse light throughout the discussion compared to how you paint Google. And you don't consider that MS is also exactly twice the age of Google (22 extra years to discontinue/kill products and services). I know whoever brought Google in the discussion was engaging in a bit of whataboutism but I think we can agree that while MS has some big failures (Windows Phone/Mobile sized), they are not standing out among other big names in the industry and are nowhere near as egregious with the practice as Google.
- extesy 7y agoYou should normalize this by the company size. Larger company is expected to discontinue more products.
- nogabebop23 7y agoWe should compare the time between officially discountinued and no longer usable. For Google products it's the same date but I did and do use MS products long after they are killed off* * Image Composer, MS Money, Media Center, Movie Maker, WinDIff, Web Matrix, Silverlight, the list goes on...
- kick 7y agoI tried a few deeper cuts, and wow, this is really thorough! Has anyone noticed anything they missed?
- wvenable 7y agoWindows 10 S seems odd as you can still purchase products, brand new, that have it. So how is it discontinued?
- mikewhy 7y agoWindows 10 "S edition" has been discontinued, in favor of Windows 10 "S Mode". What the distinction is, I'm not sure.
- wvenable 7y agoA 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 7y agoWhich 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.
- WorldMaker 7y agoThe distinction: S Mode can be enabled/disabled by an admin on any Windows 10 system, as a toggle in Settings. S Edition was briefly sold as if it was a different product or different version of Windows; to disable it one would need to purchase Windows 10 Home or Windows 10 Pro, and there was no way to reenable it.
- geogra4 7y agoFrontpage/Expression Web - but I guess WYSIWYG web dev products don't really exist anymore?
- GuiA 7y agoList 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 7y agoThe original Surface table was renamed to MS PixelSense and it's in the list: https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-microsoft-developer-products#s28 https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-micros... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense
- miohtama 7y agoMicrosoft Comic Chat, never forget https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat
- ChuckMcM 7y agoI remember it well, and talking emojis seems like something of an homage in part to this. Of course it would be a nice slack bot as well :-)
- Yhippa 7y agoSomeone 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.
- bovermyer 7y agoWindows Live Writer! I remember that. I actually miss it; it was a great desktop UI for WordPress.
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoIt’s been open sourced now: https://github.com/OpenLiveWriter https://github.com/OpenLiveWriter
- amwelles 7y agoI 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.
- wongarsu 7y agoPicking 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.
- duskwuff 7y agoThere's also a lot of really weird niche products in the business software list, like the Microsoft Stat Pack (literally just some government data on a CD-ROM), or Dynamics RMS Headquarters (a set of tools for managing a retail business). Microsoft Works was always an odd duck -- a cut-down relative of Office (except not actually Office) for home users. Merging this into Office was a sensible decision that should have happened many years ago, TBH.
- eitland 7y agoActually some things were better in Works, I especially remember being able to embed parts of a spreadsheet seemlessly into a text processor document and be able to update it one place. That was amazing back in 1995.
- tech-historian 7y agoAnd importantly, Microsoft Works came bundled for free with new PCs. MS Office was not.
- SweetLlamaMyth 7y agoWasn't it WordPad that shipped free, and Works or Word that were upsells?
- Negitivefrags 7y agoI have a hard time beliving that this one is real: https://www.versionmuseum.com/images/discontinued/discontinued-microsoft-hardware/discontinued-microsoft-hardware%5E2003%5Emicrosoft-iloo-illustration.jpg https://www.versionmuseum.com/images/discontinued/discontinu...
- nostromo 7y ago"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.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=16337 https://web.archive.org/web/20030705022312/http://www.europe...
- mads 7y agoLooks more like a Google product.
- macintux 7y agoMy 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).
- jxramos 7y agoThey 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
- rosybox 7y ago> 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
- bvanderplaats 7y agoStill using it, but most of our major applications have been ported to .NET / SQL Server. That being said, still some 50+ smaller / departmental style applications that continue to work, and will likely keep running in their current form for the next 10+ years. In fact, someone asked me a random foxpro question in the middle of typing this comment haha.
- EvanAnderson 7y agoThe 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 7y agoDirect 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
- bynkman 7y agoMicrosoft Bob (1995-1996), R.I.P.
- oflebbe 7y agoSomehow Xenix is not mentioned
- disconnected 7y agoWhat, 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 7y ago> it was colorful and silly You misspelled inflexible. :)
- thrower123 7y agoI really think they've missed the boat by not bringing back a NLP version of Clippy...
- thedaemon 7y agoThe 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.
- vorpalhex 7y agoI 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 7y agoI'm a happy user of Moneydance: http://moneydance.com/ http://moneydance.com/ Offline (but can download from banks or import files) and cross platform
- euroclydon 7y agoYeah, Microsoft Money. It's available for free. I have a Python script that converts QFX (Quicken) files to OFX. https://pypi.org/project/fixofx/ https://pypi.org/project/fixofx/
- tr352 7y agoOne interesting discontinued Microsoft product missing in this list is Xenix.
- euroclydon 7y agoI 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.
- ChicagoDave 7y agoThey 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.
- skissane 7y agoAppears 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.)
- fuball63 7y agoThe 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.
- rhengles 7y agoThe 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 7y agoAgreed. MS Combat Flight Sim 2 also hit that sweet spot of "just felt right" that few if any others managed.
- reiichiroh 7y agoI don’t see Microsoft Songsmith on the list.
- mwattsun 7y agoOne 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 7y agoThis is great background, thanks so much for sharing! Good history lesson here.
- mwattsun 7y agoThanks. I hope this helps future historians who are curious.
- Yhippa 7y agoTwo 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.
- sahoo 7y agoGive us clippy back.
- Yuioup 7y agoI 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 7y agowhich 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."
- PeterStuer 7y agoMicrosoft Infopath, still one of the best examples of how bad marketing can doom even the best product.
- Angostura 7y agoI still remember my annoyance when Entourage was replaced with the vastly inferior Outlook for Mac.
- Legogris 7y agoHow about QBasic?
- thrower123 7y agoThe 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 7y agoLibraries to read XML: 3 at least
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoDoesn'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.