40 ms·

Killed by Microsoft

435 points by sandebert 5y ago

nvr219 5y ago
Encarta is the only thing on this list that was meaningful to me in any way.
RachelF 5y ago
I miss CodePlex, there was much useful source code there, and most of what I'm looking for now has not been migrated anywhere. Sad.
entropie 5y ago
Is there a similar list for google? I dont know most of this entries in the list, but I can name like 5 things google has "killed" that I actually liked. Iam still pissed they buried reader.
- ro_bit 5y ago
  https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
  - entropie 5y ago
    It was so easy that I could have thought of it myself. Thanks.
    - rvba 5y ago
      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.
      - Marcus10110 5y ago
        It's not just a rip-off, it's build directly on top of the killedbygoogle repository! https://github.com/fabianoriccardi/killed-by-microsoft https://github.com/fabianoriccardi/killed-by-microsoft is not a fork, but it has many of the commits from https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle The earliest commits from fabianoriccardi include git messages like: > replacing "Google" with "Microsoft", removed PressCoverage Anyway, great code recycling at least right? It's a fun thought that the author of killedbygoogle ultimately wrote most of the code on killed-by-microsoft. Contributor summary: https://github.com/fabianoriccardi/killed-by-microsoft/graphs/contributors https://github.com/fabianoriccardi/killed-by-microsoft/graph... https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle/graphs/contributors https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle/graphs/contribut...
        codyogden 5y ago
        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. :)
      - Dylan16807 5y ago
        > Microsoft Edge just switched its technology and still exists. "Just" is a severe understatement, especially because they switched to the monoculture.
  - philwelch 5y ago
    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.
- mdoms 5y ago
  RIP Google Inbox.
  - seanw444 5y ago
    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.
fennecfoxen 5y ago
RIP Microsoft Comic Chat. The true loss to humanity!
tootie 5y ago
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.
bhauer 5y ago
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.
- logbiscuitswave 5y ago
  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.
comonoid 5y ago
I really miss Minecraft Earth.
trulyme 5y ago
Lync is getting killed? Nice! Can we please take care of Teams next?
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
"Nokia" should get its own entry.
- weberer 5y ago
  Microsoft only sabotaged, then bought Nokia's mobile phone division. The rest of Nokia is doing fine making networking equipment and various other things.
h2odragon 5y ago
the Trackball Explorer and the Sidewinder Force Feedback joystick should get entries.
- wkearney99 5y ago
  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).
  - h2odragon 5y ago
    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.
ryan-duve 5y ago
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.
- _3u10 5y ago
  MS Graveyard is exactly how they’d name it too lol. Well done. *Microsoft Active Azure Graveyard for Products - Enterprise Edition 2022 .Net
- Mindless2112 5y ago
  It isn't even fair to say that some of these products are dead. For example, you can still use Microsoft Streets & Trips today, as it's from an era when you bought (rather than rented) software. It's just not getting any more updates, so its usefulness diminishes as the road network changes.
  - rvba 5y ago
    Microaoft Edge continues too, it just switched technology
    - jchw 5y ago
      EdgeHTML really is dead, however, and that has significance considering it was an independent browser engine (also, one that applications could embed)
      - sedatk 5y ago
        Edge is still IE11 compatible[1] and still provides an embeddable component (WebView2)[2]. [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/edge-ie-mode https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/edge-ie-mode [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/
gjsman-1000 5y ago
Good list - but I don’t think Windows 10 IoT Core is dead. It’s been renamed to just Windows IoT Core, but otherwise it is still quite available.
- lstamour 5y ago
  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.
The_rationalist 5y ago
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?
- weberer 5y ago
  https://about.google/intl/ALL_us/products/#all-products https://about.google/intl/ALL_us/products/#all-products
  - The_rationalist 5y ago
    No description though
- user_7832 5y ago
  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.
danielovichdk 5y ago
I miss movie maker, live writer and windows phone.
- randerson 5y ago
  Movie Maker (sort of) lives on as "Video Editor".
- mdoms 5y ago
  Movie Maker was great. There is in fact a little-known useful video editor built into Windows 10 and 11 called Video Editor (previously was only available through the Photos app for some reason) but it doesn't hold a candle to Movie Maker.
- valdect 5y ago
  movie maker was simple and useful
Pxtl 5y ago
Games for Windows Live belongs there. When that service went down took a lot of online games that depended on it with it.
- jnwatson 5y ago
  Huh, I didn’t realize they ended that.
  - Pxtl 5y ago
    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.
    - Pxtl 5y ago
      Whoops this was a reply to wrong comment.
- daveoc64 5y ago
  It's a common misconception that Microsoft closed the Games for Windows Live service. Basic features still work: https://support.xbox.com/en-GB/help/games-apps/my-games-apps/games-for-windows-live-support-faq https://support.xbox.com/en-GB/help/games-apps/my-games-apps...
  - Pxtl 5y ago
    Regardless, there are many games on Steam that depend on GFWL that require herculean efforts to get to even run because they're looking for API endpoints that no longer exist.
- GrumpyNl 5y ago
  They killed solitaire.
whoopdeepoo 5y ago
Skype is alive in name only
- tester756 5y ago
  I've been using it for the first two years of Covid's WFH
  - smt88 5y ago
    The underlying technology is not Skype anymore. I tried to Skype with relatives recently and the application ground my (recent, powerful) machine completely to a halt. It was insane.
throwaways85989 5y ago
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.
tester756 5y ago
ILoo Killed almost 19 years ago, iLoo was a smart portable toilet integrating the complete equipment to surf the Internet from inside and outside the cabinet. It was 13 days old. lol
- Minor49er 5y ago
  I guess they realized that it was more economical to put the crap inside of the software rather than the other way around
tryptophan 5y ago
Wunderlist is still alive as Microsoft todo though isn't it?
- mdoms 5y ago
  I think it's a totally different product? Could be wrong though.
  - LightG 5y ago
    It seemed to be a rebrand or rewrite ... but it was never the same and I gave up on it. Haven't tried it recently so cannot remember the features they dropped, but was damned annoying. Wunderlist was fine. MS Todo was basically the same without some key features that I used. I gave up on it considering the developer timescale was snail pace... How tf do the big boys get "todo" so wrong? Google completely fluffed Google Tasks ... despite it having some really impressive features like "add email to tasks", best implementation I've seen of it. Which is a shame as the rest of the To do app is not worth anyones time. MS as well ... /endrant
    - chefandy 5y ago
      I'm evaluating todo apps and most of the easily accessible opinion/info is shitty listicles or shitty YouTube self-help gurus. Out of curiosity, what were the key dropped Wunderlist->ToDo features? I do hear a lot of people appreciate the MS ToDo "My Day" feature and know a lot of people were annoyed by the switch, but assumed it was a general distaste for MS rather than specific features. I have weird enough needs I was planning to use an open source CalDAV server, OS native clients and local push notification app for the parts the native apps don't support... but the FOSS CalDav server space is kind of rough right now.
  - Kwpolska 5y ago
    It’s different, might be a rewrite (since it took it a while to reach feature-parity), but the general idea of being a simplistic to-do app was kept.
- 5y ago
jbullock35 5y ago
Missing: Microsoft Bookshelf [1]. Encarta was a somewhat similar product, but the reference sources in Bookshelf were arguably better. For example, Bookshelf contained the unabridged American Heritage Dictionary, while Encarta used (I think) a Webster's dictionary [2]. I still use Bookshelf 1996 on most days of the week. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bookshelf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bookshelf [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta_Webster%27s_Dictionary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta_Webster%27s_Dictionary
- goblinux 5y ago
  What line of work are you in where you’re using this tool regularly? Curious to know
  - jbullock35 5y ago
    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 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.
- glitchc 5y ago
  Unless you have a Windows 3.1 vm kicking around just to support this, that seems unlikely.
  - jbullock35 5y ago
    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.
300bps 5y ago
Would like to see the product that Microsoft replaced the killed product with. For example; Edge isn’t dead. It just got replaced by a fork of Chromium. I called for them to give up on Internet Explorer and fork Chromium almost 8 years ago here on HN. I’m glad they did it but the one mistake is that they modified Chromium too much. I now get annoying prompts to scan for coupons and other ways to save money that don’t actually work. My comment from almost 8 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7909383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7909383
ThrowawayB7 5y ago
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.
silisili 5y ago
Am I the only one getting a DNS error here? Tried link and www.
- ctragena 5y ago
  It's blocked by Quad9
ModernMech 5y ago
Zune is on there twice. Speaking of Zune, I loved it. I know it got a lot of shit for being an also ran against the iPod, but it was a seriously solid media player and I found it better than the iPod in many ways. Zune software was always gorgeous, had an innovative subscription model (you get to keep some DRM free songs every month forever, even if you cancel the sub. Wish Spotify did that.) and felt innovative compared to iTunes, which looked like Excel for music.
- ILMostro7 5y ago
  I wish I had kept my Dell DJ. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Digital_Jukebox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Digital_Jukebox
dustinmoris 5y ago
I didn't realise that Internet Explorer Edge is dead?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
esel2k 5y ago
Is it really that bad? I believe if there is no alternative and a need then there will be a software at some point. I guess it is pure economics and I personally miss none of these.
- CameronNemo 5y ago
  I don't think this (or these) list(s) are aiming to shame MS (or Google) for shutting down products, only to catalog and preserve the history.
  - ILMostro7 5y ago
    Arguably, the names of these lists imply a level of blame; or at least evoke emotion from potential visitors. But, that's the name of the game these days.
  - smt88 5y ago
    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).
    - sofixa 5y ago
      What promise did Google break with Stadia?
      - smt88 5y ago
        One example: https://www.destructoid.com/google-stadia-facing-class-action-lawsuit-over-4k-claims/ https://www.destructoid.com/google-stadia-facing-class-actio... The subpar game library is another.
        sofixa 5y ago
        > 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.
__s 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILoo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILoo ??
ratsmack 5y ago
That list looks like mostly like Former Microsoft products. What about all of the great products that were absorbed and dismantled by Microsoft, like the fantastic visual database called Formbase.
paskozdilar 5y ago
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.
- julianlam 5y ago
  > If they had made it an open platform and allowed users to install Linux, I believe it would have taken over the world. Didn't they, though? With Maemo and later Meego (though maybe I have that swapped)? As it turns out the developer power just isn't there. That's not to say that that wouldn't be the case now, but at least back then, it wasn't able to survive. I was so incredibly excited for my Nokia N900, but at the end of the day it was not a phone running Linux, but a buggy OS with a buggy phone app.
  - harry8 5y ago
    Wut? N900 was the best, most reliable, highest quality and most polished phone I have ever owned. It's not even close. How they f.ed that up is beyond me.
    - Beltalowda 5y ago
      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.
emrahcom 5y ago
FoxPro
mattkevan 5y ago
I didn’t think Microsoft killed things. Maybe they’ve changed, but their strategy seemed to be to take something already dead, give it a jolt and Weekend at Bernie’s it under a new name until it starts to smell, then give it a jolt… E.g. , plays for sure, Zune Music, Groove music, Xbox music. Also Communicator, Lync, Skype, Teams etc.
- ntkachov 5y ago
  Ya, it seems less that they killed it, and more so they just rebranded or released a successor product. Microsoft mobile wasn't killed, it was replaced by windows phone.
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    Replace is just euphemism there. Nothing about Windows Mobile was in Windows Phone (which was also killed).
seanhunter 5y ago
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.
campl3r 5y ago
I miss windows phone
Kuinox 5y ago
Contrary to Google, Microsoft often provide a migration path to another of their service covering the same usecases. Examples: Skype For Business => Teams. Microsoft Edge => Chromium Edge. Windows 10 IoT Core => It's not dead ??? Office Viewer => Web Based Office Kinect => It's not dead ??? Microsoft Anti-Virus for Windows => Windows Defender Come on, microsoft has big flaws but backward compat/keeping old product alive is where they are one of the best in the industry.
- shireboy 5y ago
  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.
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    I am still salty about how badly they ruined Skype, though.
    - mickotron 5y ago
      Skype was amazing until it was acquired. Would Zoom even exist today if Microsoft never bought Skype?
      - jokethrowaway 5y ago
        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).
      - fomine3 5y ago
        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.
jbullock35 5y ago
Some very old Microsoft games are also missing. Example: Microsoft Decathlon. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Decathlon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Decathlon
LightG 5y ago
Feature request. All Killed by Microsoft/Google/Other projects should be required to open source them.
cschep 5y ago
A lot of these pieces of software were terrible! RIP to the one's people miss I guess but.. man. I don't miss a lot of those.
dleslie 5y ago
Microsoft Works was an amazing piece of software. Always incredibly fast, with a small footprint, and had enough features to satisfy most personal and business needs.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
xyst 5y ago
and this site was killedbyhackernews.info
farmerstan 5y ago
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.
folli 5y ago
Any suggestions for alternatives to Microsoft Academic? Google Scholar is ok, Researchgate sucks, and I'm wondering about any other such services which I might not be aware about.
- thomasahle 5y ago
  Agreed, Microsoft Academic was a super useful tool, and I haven't seen anything as good.
- elahieh 5y ago
  OpenAlex is being built. "OpenAlex is an open index of hundreds of millions of interconnected entities across the global research system." http://openalex.org/about http://openalex.org/about https://twitter.com/OpenAlex_org https://twitter.com/OpenAlex_org
doublerabbit 5y ago
How I miss MSN Messenger. They had it so right, until Skype.
- johnisgood 5y ago
  It was beautiful! My childhood's best IM, apart from IRC.
- shitlord 5y ago
  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.
foolfoolz 5y ago
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
BoumTAC 5y ago
It's missing Atom editor, it was my favorite text editor, now it's abandoned to death on github. They stop working on it the day they bought Github. I still remember Nat Friedman here in the comment section saying he won't stop developing Atom. He didn't even keep on his promise for a week.
- seanw444 5y ago
  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.
- MarcellusDrum 5y ago
  I recommend Kate by KDE. Great editor.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
yuuta 5y ago
Also: * Windows POSIX Subsystem: WSL has similar features, but not exact what the POSIX Subsystem is. * Windows OS / 2 Subsystem: Killed. * Multipoint Server: Killed in server 2016. * Hyper-V RemoteFX * WDS boot.wim deployment: Killed in server 2022 and Windows 11, although MDT provides a much better solution. * TFS: MS wants you to use Azure DevOps. * Hyper-V Server: The free ESXi alternative. MS wants you to use Azure, so it is killed with the release of server 2022. * Microsoft Security Essentials: Killed in Jan. 2020, and its signature updates will stop in 2023. * Windows CE: Replaced by Windows IoT * Aero: Such a beautiful effect. Killed in Windows 8.
- sedatk 5y ago
  > Windows POSIX Subsystem: WSL has similar features, but not exact what the POSIX Subsystem is. WSL1 is exactly a Linux subsystem. Why do you think POSIX subsystem is needed today?
virgulino 5y ago
I really miss Microsoft Systems Journal, Microsoft Internet Developer, and MSDN Magazine.
smitty1e 5y ago
Immortal: - SharePoint - VBA - Office
- danielovichdk 5y ago
  BizTalk
ineptech 5y ago
Not killed exactly, but I hate what they've done to Minecraft. It used to be something kind of unique, a game experience that was universal among kids. They paid $1.6B to gate it behind a microsoft.com account and force schoolkids and school districts in to the MS ecosystem.
- zimpenfish 5y ago
  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.)
  - DimmieMan 5y ago
    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.
dpweb 5y ago
Still like/use MS Money. Strangely the lack of updates or support means nothing.
cm2187 5y ago
Add to the list: VSTA (visual studio tools for application). C#/VB.net integrated IDE which was meant to run in parallel to VBA (and I think ultimately replace it). Microsoft Solver Foundation: an abstraction over in house and commercial solvers (Google OR Tools is a neat similar effort by the way)
paulpauper 5y ago
but is anyone really mourning the loss of Bob?
hamiltonians 5y ago
Shouldn't the Zune store, software, and Zune phone be combined as one failure?
skissane 5y ago
So many discontinued Microsoft products not listed: Xenix, Microsoft OS/2, Multiplan, Microsoft COBOL, Microsoft Fortran/PowerStation, Microsoft Pascal/QuickPascal, the classic Microsoft Basic line (BASIC/BASICA/GW-BASIC/QuickBASIC/QBASIC/PDS/VBDOS), MS-DOS, MSX-DOS, Microsoft Adventure, Microsoft Decathlon, Z-80 SoftCard, Microsoft Delta (the version control system), Windows NT OS/2 subsystem, Presentation Manager for Windows NT (an add-on which allowed you to run OS/2 1.x GUI programs on Windows NT), FoxPro, Visual FoxPro, Visual Test, Microsoft File (the classic MacOS database app), Microsoft Mail/Schedule+, Microsoft LAN Manager, Microsoft Services for Netware, Visual J++, Visual J#, Microsoft Money, Microsoft LISP (actually reselling muLISP, which Microsoft earlier had sold under its own name), InfoPath, Entourage, FrontPage, Vizact, Object Packager One ambiguity in all this is what counts as a "product". There have been a lot of things which have disappeared over the years – such as apps bundled with Windows 3.x which have disappeared in newer versions (for example, Reversi or Cardfile) – but which were never sold as independent products, do they count? And what about stuff which is discontinued but has an upwardly compatible replacement – Visual C++ is the successor to the Microsoft C/C++ line going back to the 1980s, in a somewhat similar way VB.NET is successor to the Microsoft BASIC line going back to the 1970s. Microsoft Mail was replaced by Exchange/Outlook, etc. Xenix, OS/2 and LAN Manager were effectively replaced by Windows NT, the POSIX/Interix/SFU/SUA subsystem was effectively replaced by WSL. There are also products Microsoft sold on behalf of third companies, whether rebranded or under their original names (I mentioned muLISP; muMATH and R:Base are other examples)
- whoisthemachine 5y ago
  Microsoft, contrary to the name, writes a lot of software!
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    Macrosoft aquisition may be in their future
  - ______-_-______ 5y ago
    Maybe "Micro" refers to the support window
luxuryballs 5y ago
FYI MonoGame is the continuation of XNA and is still used for game development, pretty sure Stardew Valley was made using it. Very approachable “code only” game engine if you already know C#. I’ve been playing with it for a hobby game project and so far everything works perfectly on both Mac and Windows which was surprising, didn’t even have to change a build flag or config file just starting debug on Windows or Mac Visual Studio has worked. Not only that but a random old Logitech controller connected to the Mac worked out of the box with Xbox controller code from Windows.
- Hello71 5y ago
  Stardew Valley originally used XNA, then used MonoGame for non-Windows compatibility, then switched to MonoGame entirely last year.
TrevorFSmith 5y ago
Ah, to have loved and lost. Such is life.
blablabla123 5y ago
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
macintux 5y ago
The only Microsoft software I've ever really enjoyed using: Musical Instruments (https://archive.org/details/microsoft-musical-instruments https://archive.org/details/microsoft-musical-instruments). I never owned it, but the Children's Museum in Indianapolis used to have a copy running at a kiosk. I believe it was absorbed into Encarta.
kypro 5y ago
I miss a lot of this stuff. It's odd the emotional attachment I have to software. It's almost like how pictures or smells take you back to moment in time, thinking about old software does that for me. I used to use Zune with music pass every day. Thinking about that interface now reminds me of my first job and working on startups in my spare time -- probably the happiest and wildest time of my life. Like most of my generation MSN Messenger was another I used every day. That reminds me of school, friends and teenage heartache. Windows Phone 7 was the OS of my first smart phone. It reminds me specifically of being 19, sitting at my girlfriend's kitchen table playing angry birds at 3am while eating a bowl of cereal. Windows Media Center reminds me of the hot summer nights I'd spend at my teenage girlfriend's house watching films on her XP MCE computer.
- johnnyanmac 5y ago
  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.
dvtrn 5y ago
Encarta I clutch my heart, and weep every time I think about this.
frays 5y ago
What happened to Mixer? I remember some huge names like Ninja going over to it.
- degenerate 5y ago
  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.
  - Drew_ 5y ago
    Mixer shutdown before their major contracts with Shroud and Ninja even expired (less than a year after).
px43 5y ago
Things NOT killed by Microsoft: Clear text passwords collected and stored in LSASS.EXE long term. SMBv1 Machines spraying their local user's password hashes all around the network constantly. LLMNR Symmetric (password based) authentication. SPNs with Domain Admin privileges whose password hashes can be queried by any user at any time. Full mappings of every user, machine, privileged level, authentication metadata, and active sessions available to any user on the network who feels like asking. Office macros that read/write to the file system and execute shell commands. Javascript files that can execute malicious shell commands when you try to read them. DLL hijacking Very weakly hashed passwords (NTLM) in the domain controller.
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  Things that need to be killed by Microsoft: 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.
penteston 5y ago
https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
einpoklum 5y ago
> Microsoft Comic Chat I'd say teams is a rather comic implementation of chat... or, hmmm, perhaps more like tragic.
sswaner 5y ago
Wasn’t there also a Groove that was a collaboration tool build by Ray Ozzie?
sydthrowaway 5y ago
OneNote not being able to use local files is annoying as hell.
axpy906 5y ago
I had no idea Edge got discontinued.
- majewsky 5y ago
  This is about Edge with its own engine, not Edgium.
wkearney99 5y ago
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.
D13Fd 5y ago
It's funny how, reading this list (unlike the Google list), I see very few products that I really miss. Maybe Encarta and Kinect.
neogodless 5y ago
Not to detract from the tool, but is it crowd-sourced? Moderated? Saw some repeats with a few altered details. Things like Zune and Microsoft Reader.
can16358p 5y ago
I really miss Windows Phone. It was a great alternative to iOS and Android and I used it for years (Omnia 7, then Lumia 920) until I switched to iPhone as WP was into inevitable demise by Microsoft. The interface was beautiful, smooth, modern looking. Whoever designed WP (and Zune) probably deserves a much better place than Microsoft as they were just too good. I love Apple's design aesthetics in many ways, but still sometimes miss Windows Phone and it's tiles layout and its unique haptic feedback feeling. Not to mention that keyboard was more responsive than iOS too. (iOS is okay, still better than Android, but WP was the best in keyboard for me) I also developed for WP too, which had a nice SDK though it was too limited. Of course it could expand much more by time. For me personally, using my favorite IDE (Visual Studio) at the time with my favorite language (C#) with XAML syntax was lovely. Sad to see great potential dead.
- durnygbur 5y ago
  WP was the realistic 3rd alternative mobile ecosystem. Sad how the industry gave up without a fight to the global duopoly.
internet2000 5y ago
Did a google engineer write this?
mkoubaa 5y ago
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
tuldia 5y ago
RIP Deis
petilon 5y ago
There is the Microsoft social network that was supposed to kill Facebook: https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/07/microsoft-socl-close/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/07/microsoft-socl-close/
daniel-thompson 5y ago
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. ^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Movie_Maker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Movie_Maker
layer8 5y ago
Windows Classic Theme should be on that list, IMO.
robertwt7 5y ago
nice, can you make one for google now?
throwoutway 5y ago
They killed Microsoft Academic?! I totally missed this. I was a huge fan of that tool
qq66 5y ago
The one I miss most was Microsoft Office Picture Editor.
DrTung 5y ago
Also forgotten: Microsoft Popfly https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Popfly https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Popfly
ran3824692 5y ago
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? <!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=5"> <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="ie=edge"> <meta name="description" content="Killed by Microsoft is the Microsoft Graveyard. A full list of dead products killed by Microsoft in the Microsoft Cemetery."> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="assets/favicon.png"> <meta name="theme-color" content="#FAFAFA" /> <link rel="canonical" href="https://killedbymicrosoft.info" /> <title>Microsoft Graveyard - Killed by Microsoft</title> <meta name="image" content="https://killedbymicrosoft.info/assets/social/card.png">  <meta itemprop="name" content="Killed by Microsoft"> <meta itemprop="description" content="Killed by Microsoft is the Microsoft Graveyard. A full list of dead products killed by Microsoft in the Microsoft Cemetery."> <meta itemprop="image" content="https://killedbymicrosoft.info/assets/social/card.png">  <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image"> <meta name="twitter:title" content="Killed by Microsoft"> <meta name="twitter:description" content="Killed by Microsoft is the Microsoft Graveyard. A full list of dead products killed by Microsoft in the Microsoft Cemetery."> <meta name="twitter:site" content="@killedbygoogle"> <meta name="twitter:creator" content="@killedbygoogle"> <meta name="twitter:image:src" content="https://killedbymicrosoft.info/assets/social/card-twitter.png">  <meta name="og:title" property="og:title" content="Killed by Microsoft"> <meta name="og:url" property="og:url" content="https://killedbymicrosoft.info"> <meta name="og:description" property="og:description" content="Killed by Microsoft is the open source list of dead Microsoft products, services, and devices. It serves as a tribute and memorial of beloved services and products killed by Microsoft."> <meta name="og:image" property="og:image" content="https://killedbymicrosoft.info/assets/social/card.png"> <meta name="og:site_name" property="og:site_name" content="Killed by Microsoft"> <meta name="og:type" property="og:type" content="website"> </head> <body> <div id="killedbygoogle"></div> <script src="main.js"></script> </body> </html>
blinding-streak 5y ago
A more comprehensive list: https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-microsoft-products https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-micros...
louloulou 5y ago
Please don't kill StarCraft 2 MS
- duskwuff 5y ago
  How do you kill that which is already dead?
nojvek 5y ago
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.
notorandit 5y ago
Allora so-called OSes are missing, Venix included.
aparajit 5y ago
My favourite, Sunrise Calendar as well
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tagh 5y ago
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.
wiz21c 5y ago
If only they could kill Windows... That would help my cause a bit :-)
durnygbur 5y ago
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.
skerit 5y ago
Some of these things were buried by Microsoft after already being dead, tbh.
onetime865 5y ago
If they could only ad Sharepoint to this list, the world could start the healing process.
georgemjustin 5y ago
This is a pretty neat list
nullr0ut3 5y ago
Anyone else noticed that this domain cannot be resolved with Quad9? Wonder why that is.
Beegle 5y ago
There is a lot of opinion scattered throughout this list.

435 points by sandebert 5y ago

Encarta is the only thing on this list that was meaningful to me in any way.

I miss CodePlex, there was much useful source code there, and most of what I'm looking for now has not been migrated anywhere. Sad.

entropie 5y ago

Is there a similar list for google? I dont know most of this entries in the list, but I can name like 5 things google has "killed" that I actually liked. Iam still pissed they buried reader.

ro_bit 5y ago
https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- entropie 5y ago
  It was so easy that I could have thought of it myself. Thanks.
  - rvba 5y ago
    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.
    - Marcus10110 5y ago
      It's not just a rip-off, it's build directly on top of the killedbygoogle repository! https://github.com/fabianoriccardi/killed-by-microsoft https://github.com/fabianoriccardi/killed-by-microsoft is not a fork, but it has many of the commits from https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle The earliest commits from fabianoriccardi include git messages like: > replacing "Google" with "Microsoft", removed PressCoverage Anyway, great code recycling at least right? It's a fun thought that the author of killedbygoogle ultimately wrote most of the code on killed-by-microsoft. Contributor summary: https://github.com/fabianoriccardi/killed-by-microsoft/graphs/contributors https://github.com/fabianoriccardi/killed-by-microsoft/graph... https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle/graphs/contributors https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle/graphs/contribut...
      - codyogden 5y ago
        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. :)
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      > Microsoft Edge just switched its technology and still exists. "Just" is a severe understatement, especially because they switched to the monoculture.
- philwelch 5y ago
  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.
mdoms 5y ago
RIP Google Inbox.
- seanw444 5y ago
  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.

fennecfoxen 5y ago

RIP Microsoft Comic Chat. The true loss to humanity!

tootie 5y ago

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.

bhauer 5y ago

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.

logbiscuitswave 5y ago
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.

comonoid 5y ago

I really miss Minecraft Earth.

trulyme 5y ago

Lync is getting killed? Nice! Can we please take care of Teams next?

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

"Nokia" should get its own entry.

weberer 5y ago
Microsoft only sabotaged, then bought Nokia's mobile phone division. The rest of Nokia is doing fine making networking equipment and various other things.

h2odragon 5y ago

the Trackball Explorer and the Sidewinder Force Feedback joystick should get entries.

wkearney99 5y ago
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).
- h2odragon 5y ago
  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.

ryan-duve 5y ago

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.

_3u10 5y ago
MS Graveyard is exactly how they’d name it too lol. Well done. *Microsoft Active Azure Graveyard for Products - Enterprise Edition 2022 .Net
Mindless2112 5y ago
It isn't even fair to say that some of these products are dead. For example, you can still use Microsoft Streets & Trips today, as it's from an era when you bought (rather than rented) software. It's just not getting any more updates, so its usefulness diminishes as the road network changes.
- rvba 5y ago
  Microaoft Edge continues too, it just switched technology
  - jchw 5y ago
    EdgeHTML really is dead, however, and that has significance considering it was an independent browser engine (also, one that applications could embed)
    - sedatk 5y ago
      Edge is still IE11 compatible[1] and still provides an embeddable component (WebView2)[2]. [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/edge-ie-mode https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/edge-ie-mode [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/

gjsman-1000 5y ago

Good list - but I don’t think Windows 10 IoT Core is dead. It’s been renamed to just Windows IoT Core, but otherwise it is still quite available.

lstamour 5y ago
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.

The_rationalist 5y ago

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?

weberer 5y ago
https://about.google/intl/ALL_us/products/#all-products https://about.google/intl/ALL_us/products/#all-products
- The_rationalist 5y ago
  No description though
user_7832 5y ago
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.

danielovichdk 5y ago

I miss movie maker, live writer and windows phone.

randerson 5y ago
Movie Maker (sort of) lives on as "Video Editor".
mdoms 5y ago
Movie Maker was great. There is in fact a little-known useful video editor built into Windows 10 and 11 called Video Editor (previously was only available through the Photos app for some reason) but it doesn't hold a candle to Movie Maker.
valdect 5y ago
movie maker was simple and useful

Pxtl 5y ago

Games for Windows Live belongs there. When that service went down took a lot of online games that depended on it with it.

jnwatson 5y ago
Huh, I didn’t realize they ended that.
- Pxtl 5y ago
  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.
  - Pxtl 5y ago
    Whoops this was a reply to wrong comment.
daveoc64 5y ago
It's a common misconception that Microsoft closed the Games for Windows Live service. Basic features still work: https://support.xbox.com/en-GB/help/games-apps/my-games-apps/games-for-windows-live-support-faq https://support.xbox.com/en-GB/help/games-apps/my-games-apps...
- Pxtl 5y ago
  Regardless, there are many games on Steam that depend on GFWL that require herculean efforts to get to even run because they're looking for API endpoints that no longer exist.
GrumpyNl 5y ago
They killed solitaire.

whoopdeepoo 5y ago

Skype is alive in name only

tester756 5y ago
I've been using it for the first two years of Covid's WFH
- smt88 5y ago
  The underlying technology is not Skype anymore. I tried to Skype with relatives recently and the application ground my (recent, powerful) machine completely to a halt. It was insane.

throwaways85989 5y ago

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.

tester756 5y ago

ILoo Killed almost 19 years ago, iLoo was a smart portable toilet integrating the complete equipment to surf the Internet from inside and outside the cabinet. It was 13 days old. lol

Minor49er 5y ago
I guess they realized that it was more economical to put the crap inside of the software rather than the other way around

tryptophan 5y ago

Wunderlist is still alive as Microsoft todo though isn't it?

mdoms 5y ago
I think it's a totally different product? Could be wrong though.
- LightG 5y ago
  It seemed to be a rebrand or rewrite ... but it was never the same and I gave up on it. Haven't tried it recently so cannot remember the features they dropped, but was damned annoying. Wunderlist was fine. MS Todo was basically the same without some key features that I used. I gave up on it considering the developer timescale was snail pace... How tf do the big boys get "todo" so wrong? Google completely fluffed Google Tasks ... despite it having some really impressive features like "add email to tasks", best implementation I've seen of it. Which is a shame as the rest of the To do app is not worth anyones time. MS as well ... /endrant
  - chefandy 5y ago
    I'm evaluating todo apps and most of the easily accessible opinion/info is shitty listicles or shitty YouTube self-help gurus. Out of curiosity, what were the key dropped Wunderlist->ToDo features? I do hear a lot of people appreciate the MS ToDo "My Day" feature and know a lot of people were annoyed by the switch, but assumed it was a general distaste for MS rather than specific features. I have weird enough needs I was planning to use an open source CalDAV server, OS native clients and local push notification app for the parts the native apps don't support... but the FOSS CalDav server space is kind of rough right now.
- Kwpolska 5y ago
  It’s different, might be a rewrite (since it took it a while to reach feature-parity), but the general idea of being a simplistic to-do app was kept.
5y ago

jbullock35 5y ago

Missing: Microsoft Bookshelf [1]. Encarta was a somewhat similar product, but the reference sources in Bookshelf were arguably better. For example, Bookshelf contained the unabridged American Heritage Dictionary, while Encarta used (I think) a Webster's dictionary [2]. I still use Bookshelf 1996 on most days of the week. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bookshelf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bookshelf [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta_Webster%27s_Dictionary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta_Webster%27s_Dictionary

goblinux 5y ago
What line of work are you in where you’re using this tool regularly? Curious to know
- jbullock35 5y ago
  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 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.
glitchc 5y ago
Unless you have a Windows 3.1 vm kicking around just to support this, that seems unlikely.
- jbullock35 5y ago
  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.

300bps 5y ago

Would like to see the product that Microsoft replaced the killed product with. For example; Edge isn’t dead. It just got replaced by a fork of Chromium. I called for them to give up on Internet Explorer and fork Chromium almost 8 years ago here on HN. I’m glad they did it but the one mistake is that they modified Chromium too much. I now get annoying prompts to scan for coupons and other ways to save money that don’t actually work. My comment from almost 8 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7909383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7909383

ThrowawayB7 5y ago

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.

silisili 5y ago

Am I the only one getting a DNS error here? Tried link and www.

ctragena 5y ago
It's blocked by Quad9

ModernMech 5y ago

Zune is on there twice. Speaking of Zune, I loved it. I know it got a lot of shit for being an also ran against the iPod, but it was a seriously solid media player and I found it better than the iPod in many ways. Zune software was always gorgeous, had an innovative subscription model (you get to keep some DRM free songs every month forever, even if you cancel the sub. Wish Spotify did that.) and felt innovative compared to iTunes, which looked like Excel for music.

ILMostro7 5y ago
I wish I had kept my Dell DJ. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Digital_Jukebox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Digital_Jukebox

dustinmoris 5y ago

I didn't realise that Internet Explorer Edge is dead?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

esel2k 5y ago

Is it really that bad? I believe if there is no alternative and a need then there will be a software at some point. I guess it is pure economics and I personally miss none of these.

CameronNemo 5y ago
I don't think this (or these) list(s) are aiming to shame MS (or Google) for shutting down products, only to catalog and preserve the history.
- ILMostro7 5y ago
  Arguably, the names of these lists imply a level of blame; or at least evoke emotion from potential visitors. But, that's the name of the game these days.
- smt88 5y ago
  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).
  - sofixa 5y ago
    What promise did Google break with Stadia?
    - smt88 5y ago
      One example: https://www.destructoid.com/google-stadia-facing-class-action-lawsuit-over-4k-claims/ https://www.destructoid.com/google-stadia-facing-class-actio... The subpar game library is another.
      - sofixa 5y ago
        > 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.

__s 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILoo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILoo ??

ratsmack 5y ago

That list looks like mostly like Former Microsoft products. What about all of the great products that were absorbed and dismantled by Microsoft, like the fantastic visual database called Formbase.

paskozdilar 5y ago

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.

julianlam 5y ago
> If they had made it an open platform and allowed users to install Linux, I believe it would have taken over the world. Didn't they, though? With Maemo and later Meego (though maybe I have that swapped)? As it turns out the developer power just isn't there. That's not to say that that wouldn't be the case now, but at least back then, it wasn't able to survive. I was so incredibly excited for my Nokia N900, but at the end of the day it was not a phone running Linux, but a buggy OS with a buggy phone app.
- harry8 5y ago
  Wut? N900 was the best, most reliable, highest quality and most polished phone I have ever owned. It's not even close. How they f.ed that up is beyond me.
  - Beltalowda 5y ago
    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.

emrahcom 5y ago

FoxPro

mattkevan 5y ago

I didn’t think Microsoft killed things. Maybe they’ve changed, but their strategy seemed to be to take something already dead, give it a jolt and Weekend at Bernie’s it under a new name until it starts to smell, then give it a jolt… E.g. , plays for sure, Zune Music, Groove music, Xbox music. Also Communicator, Lync, Skype, Teams etc.

ntkachov 5y ago
Ya, it seems less that they killed it, and more so they just rebranded or released a successor product. Microsoft mobile wasn't killed, it was replaced by windows phone.
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  Replace is just euphemism there. Nothing about Windows Mobile was in Windows Phone (which was also killed).

seanhunter 5y ago

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.

campl3r 5y ago

I miss windows phone

Kuinox 5y ago

Contrary to Google, Microsoft often provide a migration path to another of their service covering the same usecases. Examples: Skype For Business => Teams. Microsoft Edge => Chromium Edge. Windows 10 IoT Core => It's not dead ??? Office Viewer => Web Based Office Kinect => It's not dead ??? Microsoft Anti-Virus for Windows => Windows Defender Come on, microsoft has big flaws but backward compat/keeping old product alive is where they are one of the best in the industry.

shireboy 5y ago
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.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  I am still salty about how badly they ruined Skype, though.
  - mickotron 5y ago
    Skype was amazing until it was acquired. Would Zoom even exist today if Microsoft never bought Skype?
    - jokethrowaway 5y ago
      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).
    - fomine3 5y ago
      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.

jbullock35 5y ago

Some very old Microsoft games are also missing. Example: Microsoft Decathlon. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Decathlon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Decathlon

LightG 5y ago

Feature request. All Killed by Microsoft/Google/Other projects should be required to open source them.

cschep 5y ago

A lot of these pieces of software were terrible! RIP to the one's people miss I guess but.. man. I don't miss a lot of those.

dleslie 5y ago

Microsoft Works was an amazing piece of software. Always incredibly fast, with a small footprint, and had enough features to satisfy most personal and business needs.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

xyst 5y ago

and this site was killedbyhackernews.info

farmerstan 5y ago

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.

folli 5y ago

Any suggestions for alternatives to Microsoft Academic? Google Scholar is ok, Researchgate sucks, and I'm wondering about any other such services which I might not be aware about.

thomasahle 5y ago
Agreed, Microsoft Academic was a super useful tool, and I haven't seen anything as good.
elahieh 5y ago
OpenAlex is being built. "OpenAlex is an open index of hundreds of millions of interconnected entities across the global research system." http://openalex.org/about http://openalex.org/about https://twitter.com/OpenAlex_org https://twitter.com/OpenAlex_org

doublerabbit 5y ago

How I miss MSN Messenger. They had it so right, until Skype.

johnisgood 5y ago
It was beautiful! My childhood's best IM, apart from IRC.
shitlord 5y ago
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.

foolfoolz 5y ago

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

BoumTAC 5y ago

It's missing Atom editor, it was my favorite text editor, now it's abandoned to death on github. They stop working on it the day they bought Github. I still remember Nat Friedman here in the comment section saying he won't stop developing Atom. He didn't even keep on his promise for a week.

seanw444 5y ago
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.
MarcellusDrum 5y ago
I recommend Kate by KDE. Great editor.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

yuuta 5y ago

Also: * Windows POSIX Subsystem: WSL has similar features, but not exact what the POSIX Subsystem is. * Windows OS / 2 Subsystem: Killed. * Multipoint Server: Killed in server 2016. * Hyper-V RemoteFX * WDS boot.wim deployment: Killed in server 2022 and Windows 11, although MDT provides a much better solution. * TFS: MS wants you to use Azure DevOps. * Hyper-V Server: The free ESXi alternative. MS wants you to use Azure, so it is killed with the release of server 2022. * Microsoft Security Essentials: Killed in Jan. 2020, and its signature updates will stop in 2023. * Windows CE: Replaced by Windows IoT * Aero: Such a beautiful effect. Killed in Windows 8.

sedatk 5y ago
> Windows POSIX Subsystem: WSL has similar features, but not exact what the POSIX Subsystem is. WSL1 is exactly a Linux subsystem. Why do you think POSIX subsystem is needed today?

virgulino 5y ago

I really miss Microsoft Systems Journal, Microsoft Internet Developer, and MSDN Magazine.

smitty1e 5y ago

Immortal: - SharePoint - VBA - Office

danielovichdk 5y ago
BizTalk

ineptech 5y ago

Not killed exactly, but I hate what they've done to Minecraft. It used to be something kind of unique, a game experience that was universal among kids. They paid $1.6B to gate it behind a microsoft.com account and force schoolkids and school districts in to the MS ecosystem.

zimpenfish 5y ago
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.)
- DimmieMan 5y ago
  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.

dpweb 5y ago

Still like/use MS Money. Strangely the lack of updates or support means nothing.

cm2187 5y ago

Add to the list: VSTA (visual studio tools for application). C#/VB.net integrated IDE which was meant to run in parallel to VBA (and I think ultimately replace it). Microsoft Solver Foundation: an abstraction over in house and commercial solvers (Google OR Tools is a neat similar effort by the way)

paulpauper 5y ago

but is anyone really mourning the loss of Bob?

hamiltonians 5y ago

Shouldn't the Zune store, software, and Zune phone be combined as one failure?

skissane 5y ago

So many discontinued Microsoft products not listed: Xenix, Microsoft OS/2, Multiplan, Microsoft COBOL, Microsoft Fortran/PowerStation, Microsoft Pascal/QuickPascal, the classic Microsoft Basic line (BASIC/BASICA/GW-BASIC/QuickBASIC/QBASIC/PDS/VBDOS), MS-DOS, MSX-DOS, Microsoft Adventure, Microsoft Decathlon, Z-80 SoftCard, Microsoft Delta (the version control system), Windows NT OS/2 subsystem, Presentation Manager for Windows NT (an add-on which allowed you to run OS/2 1.x GUI programs on Windows NT), FoxPro, Visual FoxPro, Visual Test, Microsoft File (the classic MacOS database app), Microsoft Mail/Schedule+, Microsoft LAN Manager, Microsoft Services for Netware, Visual J++, Visual J#, Microsoft Money, Microsoft LISP (actually reselling muLISP, which Microsoft earlier had sold under its own name), InfoPath, Entourage, FrontPage, Vizact, Object Packager One ambiguity in all this is what counts as a "product". There have been a lot of things which have disappeared over the years – such as apps bundled with Windows 3.x which have disappeared in newer versions (for example, Reversi or Cardfile) – but which were never sold as independent products, do they count? And what about stuff which is discontinued but has an upwardly compatible replacement – Visual C++ is the successor to the Microsoft C/C++ line going back to the 1980s, in a somewhat similar way VB.NET is successor to the Microsoft BASIC line going back to the 1970s. Microsoft Mail was replaced by Exchange/Outlook, etc. Xenix, OS/2 and LAN Manager were effectively replaced by Windows NT, the POSIX/Interix/SFU/SUA subsystem was effectively replaced by WSL. There are also products Microsoft sold on behalf of third companies, whether rebranded or under their original names (I mentioned muLISP; muMATH and R:Base are other examples)

whoisthemachine 5y ago
Microsoft, contrary to the name, writes a lot of software!
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Macrosoft aquisition may be in their future
- ______-_-______ 5y ago
  Maybe "Micro" refers to the support window

luxuryballs 5y ago

FYI MonoGame is the continuation of XNA and is still used for game development, pretty sure Stardew Valley was made using it. Very approachable “code only” game engine if you already know C#. I’ve been playing with it for a hobby game project and so far everything works perfectly on both Mac and Windows which was surprising, didn’t even have to change a build flag or config file just starting debug on Windows or Mac Visual Studio has worked. Not only that but a random old Logitech controller connected to the Mac worked out of the box with Xbox controller code from Windows.

Hello71 5y ago
Stardew Valley originally used XNA, then used MonoGame for non-Windows compatibility, then switched to MonoGame entirely last year.

TrevorFSmith 5y ago

Ah, to have loved and lost. Such is life.

blablabla123 5y ago

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

macintux 5y ago

The only Microsoft software I've ever really enjoyed using: Musical Instruments (https://archive.org/details/microsoft-musical-instruments https://archive.org/details/microsoft-musical-instruments). I never owned it, but the Children's Museum in Indianapolis used to have a copy running at a kiosk. I believe it was absorbed into Encarta.

kypro 5y ago

I miss a lot of this stuff. It's odd the emotional attachment I have to software. It's almost like how pictures or smells take you back to moment in time, thinking about old software does that for me. I used to use Zune with music pass every day. Thinking about that interface now reminds me of my first job and working on startups in my spare time -- probably the happiest and wildest time of my life. Like most of my generation MSN Messenger was another I used every day. That reminds me of school, friends and teenage heartache. Windows Phone 7 was the OS of my first smart phone. It reminds me specifically of being 19, sitting at my girlfriend's kitchen table playing angry birds at 3am while eating a bowl of cereal. Windows Media Center reminds me of the hot summer nights I'd spend at my teenage girlfriend's house watching films on her XP MCE computer.

johnnyanmac 5y ago
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.

dvtrn 5y ago

Encarta I clutch my heart, and weep every time I think about this.

frays 5y ago

What happened to Mixer? I remember some huge names like Ninja going over to it.

degenerate 5y ago
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.
- Drew_ 5y ago
  Mixer shutdown before their major contracts with Shroud and Ninja even expired (less than a year after).

px43 5y ago

Things NOT killed by Microsoft: Clear text passwords collected and stored in LSASS.EXE long term. SMBv1 Machines spraying their local user's password hashes all around the network constantly. LLMNR Symmetric (password based) authentication. SPNs with Domain Admin privileges whose password hashes can be queried by any user at any time. Full mappings of every user, machine, privileged level, authentication metadata, and active sessions available to any user on the network who feels like asking. Office macros that read/write to the file system and execute shell commands. Javascript files that can execute malicious shell commands when you try to read them. DLL hijacking Very weakly hashed passwords (NTLM) in the domain controller.

BizarroLand 5y ago
Things that need to be killed by Microsoft: 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.

penteston 5y ago

https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/

einpoklum 5y ago

> Microsoft Comic Chat I'd say teams is a rather comic implementation of chat... or, hmmm, perhaps more like tragic.

sswaner 5y ago

Wasn’t there also a Groove that was a collaboration tool build by Ray Ozzie?

sydthrowaway 5y ago

OneNote not being able to use local files is annoying as hell.

axpy906 5y ago

I had no idea Edge got discontinued.

majewsky 5y ago
This is about Edge with its own engine, not Edgium.

wkearney99 5y ago

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.

D13Fd 5y ago

It's funny how, reading this list (unlike the Google list), I see very few products that I really miss. Maybe Encarta and Kinect.

neogodless 5y ago

Not to detract from the tool, but is it crowd-sourced? Moderated? Saw some repeats with a few altered details. Things like Zune and Microsoft Reader.

can16358p 5y ago

I really miss Windows Phone. It was a great alternative to iOS and Android and I used it for years (Omnia 7, then Lumia 920) until I switched to iPhone as WP was into inevitable demise by Microsoft. The interface was beautiful, smooth, modern looking. Whoever designed WP (and Zune) probably deserves a much better place than Microsoft as they were just too good. I love Apple's design aesthetics in many ways, but still sometimes miss Windows Phone and it's tiles layout and its unique haptic feedback feeling. Not to mention that keyboard was more responsive than iOS too. (iOS is okay, still better than Android, but WP was the best in keyboard for me) I also developed for WP too, which had a nice SDK though it was too limited. Of course it could expand much more by time. For me personally, using my favorite IDE (Visual Studio) at the time with my favorite language (C#) with XAML syntax was lovely. Sad to see great potential dead.

durnygbur 5y ago
WP was the realistic 3rd alternative mobile ecosystem. Sad how the industry gave up without a fight to the global duopoly.

internet2000 5y ago

Did a google engineer write this?

mkoubaa 5y ago

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

tuldia 5y ago

RIP Deis

petilon 5y ago

There is the Microsoft social network that was supposed to kill Facebook: https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/07/microsoft-socl-close/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/07/microsoft-socl-close/

daniel-thompson 5y ago

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. ^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Movie_Maker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Movie_Maker

layer8 5y ago

Windows Classic Theme should be on that list, IMO.

robertwt7 5y ago

nice, can you make one for google now?

throwoutway 5y ago

They killed Microsoft Academic?! I totally missed this. I was a huge fan of that tool

qq66 5y ago

The one I miss most was Microsoft Office Picture Editor.

DrTung 5y ago

Also forgotten: Microsoft Popfly https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Popfly https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Popfly

ran3824692 5y ago

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? <!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=5"> <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="ie=edge"> <meta name="description" content="Killed by Microsoft is the Microsoft Graveyard. A full list of dead products killed by Microsoft in the Microsoft Cemetery."> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="assets/favicon.png"> <meta name="theme-color" content="#FAFAFA" /> <link rel="canonical" href="https://killedbymicrosoft.info" /> <title>Microsoft Graveyard - Killed by Microsoft</title> <meta name="image" content="https://killedbymicrosoft.info/assets/social/card.png">  <meta itemprop="name" content="Killed by Microsoft"> <meta itemprop="description" content="Killed by Microsoft is the Microsoft Graveyard. A full list of dead products killed by Microsoft in the Microsoft Cemetery."> <meta itemprop="image" content="https://killedbymicrosoft.info/assets/social/card.png">  <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image"> <meta name="twitter:title" content="Killed by Microsoft"> <meta name="twitter:description" content="Killed by Microsoft is the Microsoft Graveyard. A full list of dead products killed by Microsoft in the Microsoft Cemetery."> <meta name="twitter:site" content="@killedbygoogle"> <meta name="twitter:creator" content="@killedbygoogle"> <meta name="twitter:image:src" content="https://killedbymicrosoft.info/assets/social/card-twitter.png">  <meta name="og:title" property="og:title" content="Killed by Microsoft"> <meta name="og:url" property="og:url" content="https://killedbymicrosoft.info"> <meta name="og:description" property="og:description" content="Killed by Microsoft is the open source list of dead Microsoft products, services, and devices. It serves as a tribute and memorial of beloved services and products killed by Microsoft."> <meta name="og:image" property="og:image" content="https://killedbymicrosoft.info/assets/social/card.png"> <meta name="og:site_name" property="og:site_name" content="Killed by Microsoft"> <meta name="og:type" property="og:type" content="website"> </head> <body> <div id="killedbygoogle"></div> <script src="main.js"></script> </body> </html>

blinding-streak 5y ago

A more comprehensive list: https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-microsoft-products https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-micros...

louloulou 5y ago

Please don't kill StarCraft 2 MS

duskwuff 5y ago
How do you kill that which is already dead?

nojvek 5y ago

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.

notorandit 5y ago

Allora so-called OSes are missing, Venix included.

aparajit 5y ago

My favourite, Sunrise Calendar as well

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tagh 5y ago

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.

wiz21c 5y ago

If only they could kill Windows... That would help my cause a bit :-)

durnygbur 5y ago

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.

skerit 5y ago

Some of these things were buried by Microsoft after already being dead, tbh.

onetime865 5y ago

If they could only ad Sharepoint to this list, the world could start the healing process.

georgemjustin 5y ago

This is a pretty neat list

nullr0ut3 5y ago

Anyone else noticed that this domain cannot be resolved with Quad9? Wonder why that is.

Beegle 5y ago

There is a lot of opinion scattered throughout this list.