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Contrary to Google, Microsoft often provide a migration path to another of their service covering the same usecases. Examples: Skype For Business => Teams. M

by 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 Sometimes- like for devs invested in Silverlight- it can be frustrating, but no reason to keep inferior or outdated products afloat.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.
- neon_electro 5y ago
  I came away with the same conclusion reading this and the Google sites, but I do feel like these sites nonetheless do a public service aggregating and organizing this kind of information, even if it feels pointed at MS/Google specifically.
- adzm 5y ago
  I wish more things like Silverlight were open sourced for the community at EOL.
  - shireboy 5y ago
    There is https://www.opensilver.net/ https://www.opensilver.net/ Not sure if any is MS contributed. And I’m not sure I can recommend it as a platform. I never quite bought into XAML over HTML/CSS/JS. I’ve done both, and just would rather build a web app than XAML for most of the type things I build.
- ripley12 5y ago
  Yeah, sometimes I wish MS would be a little more aggressive about killing off products. There are a few developer technologies that are in an awkward no man’s land: just barely supported without much of a future, but MS won’t say that so it makes for a lot of confusion if you’re new to the space and wondering what technology to use.
  - Rastonbury 5y ago
    Likely they don't kill them because they have customers and have contracts stating support for X years. Not sure why people are surprised, its enterprise software. Look at SAP, they "kill" their ERP every few years for end-of-life and upgrades. I don't blame them, customers don't sign perpetual deals and they expect to sign a new ones every 5-7 years for whatever the new flavor is. It's different for free products because there is no explicit end of life and it surprises people.
robertlagrant 5y ago
Good point. Remember how easy it was to migrate off Kin? Or Windows Mobile?
kerng 5y ago
Agreed. Microsoft is really good at back compatibility - sometimes even to a fault. It also seems Microsoft sometimes is held to a higher standard when it comes to supporting products long after they are out of service. Compare that to Google and Android for instance... it's a big mess with millions of outdated and insecure devices.
- lern_too_spel 5y ago
  Google only sold Nexuses and Pixels, which compare very favorably to Microsoft's Kin phones in continuing support.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  Agreed. Google is really good at back compatibility - sometimes even to a fault. It also seems Google sometimes is held to a higher standard when it comes to supporting products long after they are out of service. Compare that to Microsoft and Windows Phone for instance, or UWP, or even Windows... it's a big mess with millions of outdated and insecure devices.
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    During Windows Phone's lifetime devices were rarely left un-upgraded or out of security support. Not quite as well as iOS, but much better than the Android situation. Arguably it was one of the reasons that phone carriers chose to kill Windows Phone because they seem to like being able to micromanage the tire fire that is Android Updates and Windows Phone was too "uppity" for them. UWP isn't "dead" and its technologies continue to get updated. Windows' left behind devices that no longer receive security updates are after at least a decade of active security support. XP was offered several lifelines, way beyond the security support of any single Android version in the history of Android. Windows 7 seems on the path to similar lifelines and maybe won't have quite the same record of security support, but will still see active security patches for much longer than any Android version could imagine.
SomeBoolshit 5y ago
There was also MSN messenger, which was more capable than Skype other than the connection to the actual telephone network (having messages be delivered later without requiring both people to be online at the same time - amazing!) and when Teams replaced Skype, even more features were dropped. What part of that is positive other than "well, you can still do some of the things but we prefer to give you an inferior product".
- kungito 5y ago
  Lets be honest, no Microsoft messaging platform had a chance to be a 2022 whatsapp/messenger competitor. They were smart to realise that and focused on their Slack alternative for businesses which they can package with the rest of Office package. And with the new EU regulation on the way it makes even less sense
  - jokethrowaway 5y ago
    It would have had a chance if they didn't screw up MSN and Skype which were both incredibly successful communication tools among teens and 20 something. Everybody was on MSN. Everybody was on Skype. Once whatsapp and facebook messenger mobile started taking place it was already N years too late. Now in 2022, they have no chance.
    - kungito 5y ago
      But that is not Microsoft's target market. They sell business oriented productivity tools. Only recently have they started having a consumer oriented gaming products which is still a small list of products around Xbox console platform
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- aksss 5y ago
  When Teams came out it didn’t have feature parity with SfB, despite their claims that it did, but here in 2022, it does. At least I can’t think of a sing feature in SfB that’s not in Teams now, and can think of many features that have been radically improved. Never used consumer Skype too much, what are you missing in Teams now?
passivate 5y ago
Also, if you have access to the executable then you can use it indefinitely (with obvious caveats).
mnd999 5y ago
Teams is unbelievably shit though. It’s like they don’t even care.
- iratewizard 5y ago
  I can't name a single messenger with worse user experience.
  - coolspot 5y ago
    Try Skype?
    - jhasse 5y ago
      After Microsoft took over, yes.
    - iratewizard 5y ago
      Even shitty Microsoft Skype isn't as bad as teams. Skype never just held onto messages without delivering them. Teams can't even do the core thing it's supposed to do correctly - send messages.
- Keyframe 5y ago
  Chat/teams itself yeah, compared to slack; and it's mostly/only UI related. Video and audio is leagues above however, and recordings integrated with Stream works like a charm. It's unbelievable how shitty audio and video is in slack however. If microsoft got its UI/UX game, it's easier to get that right than the other way around.
  - spockz 5y ago
    Have you tried other tools? Discord, zoom, webex have way better audio and video quality and include video sharing. FaceTime has superb audio and video but no screen sharing.
    - 5y ago
salmo 5y ago
Came to say the same. The vast majority of these were superseded by new products or their feature set was absorbed by other tooling. Back office was one of the worst examples. It became baked into Windows Server except Exchange. I’m no fan of MS, but they tend to err on the side of overextending support and backwards compatibility. I would have killed Works 10 years before they did. And some of these are just failures. I still have my MS Bob floppies, but come on.
- AstroJetson 5y ago
  I liked Works. It ran on much less hardware than the Office Suite did. The much lower cost was a big deal too. The reduced feature set was never a big deal, it's not often that I need to put reverse video blink in a Word doc to be printed.
  - mbreese 5y ago
    It was probably too much overhead to support Works. You’d still need an engineering team to support Works, and it wasn’t a big money maker. Much better to put some Office features behind a compiler/licensing flag and support one product with different “home” and “professional” SKUs. But I kinda wonder the same thing about Apple’s Pages/Numbers/Keynote. I’m not sure the overhead to maintain those ultimately is worthwhile. It makes me think back on the old ClarisWorks or FileMaker setup where you ostensibly had an external company that made the product, but it was an Apple subsidiary. They could then offer the product for multiple OS’s. I’m not saying that business model was all that successful, but is there a place for an MS works in the time of Google docs?
  - blagie 5y ago
    LibreOffice >> Works. Just sayin'
bscphil 5y ago
> Contrary to Google Don't know that I really agree with this. Google does have experimental services and tools that they've killed (RIP Google Reader), but they have always provided migration for their core services. Look at Messaging, for example. Gmail chat -> Hangouts -> Hangouts Chat(?) -> Allo(??) -> Hangouts (again?) -> Android Messages. The problem is not that they leave users completely stranded, the unending shift from app to app for no good reason is itself the problem. And to be clear I do think Google is worse at this than Microsoft is. But the important difference isn't over whether they provide a migration path. Forcing your users to migrate every year or two is bad, regardless of whether the migration is handled "well".
- blagie 5y ago
  Nope. I've been left stranded by Google over and over. Talk to all the happy GSuite/Free users around now. Or people who developed Chrome Extensions prior to Manifest V3. Or who were banned from Google Fi, Youtube, or your app store of choice by an automated, broken algorithm. Or who developed Workspace Docs prior to mandatory security audits at price points which will break most independent developers. Or.... The key difference is Microsoft has exactly 2 or 3 things on the entire list where any users were left stranded. For Google, you're a statistic. If a change breaks 10,000 small businesses, Google looks at the impact on their bottom line, and goes ahead with the change. Microsoft bends over backwards to NOT do this. AWS as well. It's not that it never happens, but if you've bet on your business on Google, you're basically guaranteed it will happen at one point or another.
  - bscphil 5y ago
    I think you're lashing out at Google for a variety of different (and very good!) reasons, but they're outside the range of my comment. People getting banned from Google services because of broken automation is bad, of course, but it has nothing to do with the issue of whether migration paths are provided when services are sunsetted at Google. My point is that for Google's core services, they generally due try to migrate users to a product that provides the same basic features, but that this isn't good enough. Forcing users to migrate because of pointless churn in your app offerings is already the problem, regardless of whether the migrations are handled well. Google is worse than Microsoft in this area not because they leave users stranded (usually), but because they're constantly switching their focus in products like messaging.
taspeotis 5y ago
Yeah like: > Skype for Business Expiring in over 3 years, Skype for Business (formerly Microsoft Lync and Office Communicator) was an enterprise instant messaging software developed by Microsoft as part of the Microsoft Office suite. It was almost 18 years old. It’s still around because of a lengthy transition path Microsoft offers and they admit that and then start talking about it in the past tense…
- andylynch 5y ago
  Parts are older still. The group chat in later versions of Skype for Business originated at UBS in the nineties by way of Mindalign.
- Fissionary 5y ago
  It's kinda sad that they're killing SfB. Behind the scenes, it uses SIP and SDP for establishing calls - back in the day at $BigCo, we were developing a software suite for debugging SIP infrastructure, and Skype for Business was surprisingly easy to integrate. Shame that Teams switched to a proprietary Microsoft protocol now.
  - simfree 5y ago
    Trouter (Microsoft Teams routing software for video calls and voice calls) crashes and fails to parse SDPs every day, even from Teams clients. I swear it is the least reliable session border controller we interact with, every 2 weeks a new software version is rolled out and new things break while tickets about bugs we filed with Microsoft continue to go ignored.
johnnyanmac 5y ago
>Kinect => It's not dead ??? Is it alive? It very much has an immensely passionate community of students and hobbyists using it in ways well past its intended use (e.g. it's some of the cheapest mocap hardware you can buy). But I don't think you've been able to officially purchase one for 4+ years now. Hard to call that "alive" in a business sense. Honestly a real shame that Xbox hasn't pivoted it into some other team that can market it towards creators. In particular the whole "VTuber" phenomenon may benefit form a cheap(ish), dedicated motion tracking device instead of relying on a high end iPhone or fanagling with some generic webcam.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  There isn’t much money in selling to creators? And the niche the Kinect had with active gaming has been reliably filled by Meta/Facebook/oculus’s quest, it’s too bad Microsoft didn’t explore that more deeply.
  - johnnyanmac 5y ago
    Likely not, not in its current form. I wouldn't be surprised if in 2010 that Kinect was being sold at a significant loss (as is the usual trend in the games industry). They'd need to tweak the device quite a bit to be B2B, but given the success of game engines, asset packs, and other tools I don't think it's impossible. Creators will absolutely pay a premium for such tech when the alternative goes for thousands of dollars (a quick google shows these devices selling on the order of 2000 to 7000+ USD). The SDK alone would generate much more value for such a product. VR definitely killed any interest in the "core" gaming market, but I think the uses of motion tracking is a completely separate audience from VR anyway. Without some dedicated apparel, a VR kit can only track your eyes and hands. motion tracking gives you so much more data to work with, for potentially multiple subjects as well. People working with that data will easily pay themselves back with whatever they develop with it, which is why maybe a licensing deal (similar to Unity/Unreal Engine) may be a better way to monetize .
    - freeone3000 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
moooo99 5y ago
I am really looking forward to the day Skype for Business finally dies forever. We introduced Teams a few years ago in our org. Back then it was lacking some of the features frequently used in Skype, so you'd have to keep both. Now, years later, about half of the org is still using Skype for no apparent reason. I don't particularly like Teams, primarily because of the excessive resource usage, but it is still better in every way.
Thorrez 5y ago
https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ contains Nexus. That was clearly replaced by Pixel. Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on anything related to this.
- syshum 5y ago
  No... Sorry just no Nexus line was an Affordable/ value reference implantation of Android Pixel is an overpriced atrocity marketing platform for Google. Pixel IS NOT a replacement for Nexus
  - zerocrates 5y ago
    The "a" Pixels are pretty much in the same space as Nexus was.
  - Rebelgecko 5y ago
    I think the Nexus 6 cost $50 more than the Pixel 6 does, even before you take inflation into account
    - selcuka 5y ago
      Might be true for Nexus 6, but Nexus 4 was from $299 at launch and had flagship specs. Nexus 5 was $399, again an affordable phone.
    - syshum 5y ago
      The Nexus 6P has the same spec's as the FlagShip Pixel for 1/2 the price
      - Thorrez 5y ago
        6P was $500, Pixel 1 was $650, Pixel 1 XL was $750. https://www.theverge.com/2015/9/29/9410551/google-nexus-6p-announced-size-price-release-date https://www.theverge.com/2015/9/29/9410551/google-nexus-6p-a... https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/google-pixel-review-bland-pricey-but-still-best-android-phone/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/google-pixel-review-...
r3trohack3r 5y ago
My oldest kid is just aging into gaming. We’ve got the Disneyland Adventures game and a Kinect for her. Can confirm, Kinect is dead. You can only get them refurbished now, they’re no longer manufactured. The new consoles no longer support Kinect, we had to dig out an original Xbox One for her. When the Kinect launched, Microsoft had trouble getting a critical mass of players that would attract developers. Without developers adding support to their games, Microsoft had a hard time marketing the device. This led to them bundling it with the Xbox One, but consumers were upset that they were being forced to buy the accessory. I’m impressed they held out as long as they did, but eventually Microsoft caved and removed the Kinect from the bundle and dropped the price of the Xbox One. At that point, the Kinect was essentially dead. They quietly stopped manufacturing them and the new consoles no longer support them (though I’ve heard rumors you can buy 3rd party USB adaptors). It’s a shame. That device is SO much more engaging and approachable for kids than trying to teach them to use a controller.
- bluescrn 5y ago
  > When the Kinect launched, Microsoft had trouble getting a critical mass of players that would attract developers Developers generally disliked it. It just didn't work well as a game controller. The Wii was much more practical. You still had a controller in your hand with physical buttons, which makes a big difference, and it worked as a fairly accurate pointing device. Those more than made up for the limitations of accelerometer-only motion control.
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    In the early Xbox One days there was a lot of experiments with hybrid controls where you'd still have the controller in your hand, with its accurate joysticks and physical buttons, but have the Kinect sensor for body posture and facial expression and gestures out and away from the controller (and voice recognition). The SDKs had a bunch of interesting things about controller recognition matched to other data. The OS itself would do things like pick out which controller a specific person was holding, and could use that for sign in (among other things). The Xbox One dropped the "controller number ring" from the 360 because it could tell what person was holding the controller rather than needing to signal vice versa which controller a person should hold. There were some interesting Kinect party games that took advantage of this or nearly took advantage of this (hybrid games where maybe everyone would set down controllers for a mini-game and it wouldn't matter that everyone picked up "the right" controller back when the next controller section started). In the end, couch coop that was pretty essential to the 360 just kind of withered away in the Xbox One era (when games like Halo competing on looks with other consoles decided they couldn't afford the frames/resolution costs of split-screen coop anyway) and that missing "controller number indicator" no longer mattered in the end, but in the original plans of the Xbox One the hybrid Kinect/controller gaming support was key to things like couch coop. It's still interesting to wonder about that road not taken if more developers had considered Xbox One hybrid Kinect/controller controls more seriously beyond just the few experiments we did see.
antaviana 5y ago
I remember reading in Steve Jobs biography that when Larry Page became CEO of Google for the second time he reached out to other CEOs in the industry for advice on being a CEO. Jobs advice was to get rid of all the myriad of products and only focus on 3 or 4 key things. If I’m not wrong, spring pruning started with Page as a CEO.
wdr1 5y ago
Oh please. You're cherry picking examples. Did you use Microsoft Foxpro on Mac? I can assure you MS killed it without a migration path. What about the Zune? MS Money? Microsoft Reader?
pjmlp 5y ago
Not always, XNA (C#) => DirectXTK (C++) C++/CX => C++/WinRT (back to ATL / Visual C++ 6.0 dev experience) Form/WPF => UWP (.NET Native / C++/CX / WRL) => WinUI 3.0 (.NET with CsWinRT, C++/WinRT) .NET Framework => .NET Core All of them require rewrites, leave relevant use cases behind, at least they leave the lights running for them to still be targeted, which makes many stubborn to keep using the stuff that actually works.
- Kuinox 5y ago
  Your migration from .NET Framework to .NET Core required a rewrite? Unless you are doing low level things, I doubt. All ours library and apps survived the migration without a rewrite.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    WCF, Forms/WPF (3rd party controls), Sitecore, SharePoint, Dynamics, SQL Server managed runtime, App Domains,...
dachryn 5y ago
the skype > teams migrations was a costly endeavour for many companies. Sure on paper they give continuity by offering similar services, but in practice the cost to switch to teams is about as high as switching to whatever other solution on the market (Zoom in pole position). The only reason people stuck with teams is because it was forced upon them by the IT departments who preferred teams because it was bundled in their license. Teams was very very very rough in the beginning, compared to zoom and slack. Microsoft doesn't have the guts to call things killed off. And it keeps them in limbo forever. To me that's worse than just admitting you should move on. It's fine if they continue to offer it for business continuity purposes, and they would score many big points doing that. But don't claim they offer it at no cost
randomsearch 5y ago
IoT Core is dead. Can’t recall the details but I wanted to use it and it no longer supports modern platforms.

by Kuinox 5y ago

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.
neon_electro 5y ago
I came away with the same conclusion reading this and the Google sites, but I do feel like these sites nonetheless do a public service aggregating and organizing this kind of information, even if it feels pointed at MS/Google specifically.
adzm 5y ago
I wish more things like Silverlight were open sourced for the community at EOL.
- shireboy 5y ago
  There is https://www.opensilver.net/ https://www.opensilver.net/ Not sure if any is MS contributed. And I’m not sure I can recommend it as a platform. I never quite bought into XAML over HTML/CSS/JS. I’ve done both, and just would rather build a web app than XAML for most of the type things I build.
ripley12 5y ago
Yeah, sometimes I wish MS would be a little more aggressive about killing off products. There are a few developer technologies that are in an awkward no man’s land: just barely supported without much of a future, but MS won’t say that so it makes for a lot of confusion if you’re new to the space and wondering what technology to use.
- Rastonbury 5y ago
  Likely they don't kill them because they have customers and have contracts stating support for X years. Not sure why people are surprised, its enterprise software. Look at SAP, they "kill" their ERP every few years for end-of-life and upgrades. I don't blame them, customers don't sign perpetual deals and they expect to sign a new ones every 5-7 years for whatever the new flavor is. It's different for free products because there is no explicit end of life and it surprises people.

robertlagrant 5y ago

Good point. Remember how easy it was to migrate off Kin? Or Windows Mobile?

kerng 5y ago

Agreed. Microsoft is really good at back compatibility - sometimes even to a fault. It also seems Microsoft sometimes is held to a higher standard when it comes to supporting products long after they are out of service. Compare that to Google and Android for instance... it's a big mess with millions of outdated and insecure devices.

lern_too_spel 5y ago
Google only sold Nexuses and Pixels, which compare very favorably to Microsoft's Kin phones in continuing support.
encryptluks2 5y ago
Agreed. Google is really good at back compatibility - sometimes even to a fault. It also seems Google sometimes is held to a higher standard when it comes to supporting products long after they are out of service. Compare that to Microsoft and Windows Phone for instance, or UWP, or even Windows... it's a big mess with millions of outdated and insecure devices.
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  During Windows Phone's lifetime devices were rarely left un-upgraded or out of security support. Not quite as well as iOS, but much better than the Android situation. Arguably it was one of the reasons that phone carriers chose to kill Windows Phone because they seem to like being able to micromanage the tire fire that is Android Updates and Windows Phone was too "uppity" for them. UWP isn't "dead" and its technologies continue to get updated. Windows' left behind devices that no longer receive security updates are after at least a decade of active security support. XP was offered several lifelines, way beyond the security support of any single Android version in the history of Android. Windows 7 seems on the path to similar lifelines and maybe won't have quite the same record of security support, but will still see active security patches for much longer than any Android version could imagine.

SomeBoolshit 5y ago

There was also MSN messenger, which was more capable than Skype other than the connection to the actual telephone network (having messages be delivered later without requiring both people to be online at the same time - amazing!) and when Teams replaced Skype, even more features were dropped. What part of that is positive other than "well, you can still do some of the things but we prefer to give you an inferior product".

kungito 5y ago
Lets be honest, no Microsoft messaging platform had a chance to be a 2022 whatsapp/messenger competitor. They were smart to realise that and focused on their Slack alternative for businesses which they can package with the rest of Office package. And with the new EU regulation on the way it makes even less sense
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  It would have had a chance if they didn't screw up MSN and Skype which were both incredibly successful communication tools among teens and 20 something. Everybody was on MSN. Everybody was on Skype. Once whatsapp and facebook messenger mobile started taking place it was already N years too late. Now in 2022, they have no chance.
  - kungito 5y ago
    But that is not Microsoft's target market. They sell business oriented productivity tools. Only recently have they started having a consumer oriented gaming products which is still a small list of products around Xbox console platform
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
aksss 5y ago
When Teams came out it didn’t have feature parity with SfB, despite their claims that it did, but here in 2022, it does. At least I can’t think of a sing feature in SfB that’s not in Teams now, and can think of many features that have been radically improved. Never used consumer Skype too much, what are you missing in Teams now?

passivate 5y ago

Also, if you have access to the executable then you can use it indefinitely (with obvious caveats).

mnd999 5y ago

Teams is unbelievably shit though. It’s like they don’t even care.

iratewizard 5y ago
I can't name a single messenger with worse user experience.
- coolspot 5y ago
  Try Skype?
  - jhasse 5y ago
    After Microsoft took over, yes.
  - iratewizard 5y ago
    Even shitty Microsoft Skype isn't as bad as teams. Skype never just held onto messages without delivering them. Teams can't even do the core thing it's supposed to do correctly - send messages.
Keyframe 5y ago
Chat/teams itself yeah, compared to slack; and it's mostly/only UI related. Video and audio is leagues above however, and recordings integrated with Stream works like a charm. It's unbelievable how shitty audio and video is in slack however. If microsoft got its UI/UX game, it's easier to get that right than the other way around.
- spockz 5y ago
  Have you tried other tools? Discord, zoom, webex have way better audio and video quality and include video sharing. FaceTime has superb audio and video but no screen sharing.
  - 5y ago

salmo 5y ago

Came to say the same. The vast majority of these were superseded by new products or their feature set was absorbed by other tooling. Back office was one of the worst examples. It became baked into Windows Server except Exchange. I’m no fan of MS, but they tend to err on the side of overextending support and backwards compatibility. I would have killed Works 10 years before they did. And some of these are just failures. I still have my MS Bob floppies, but come on.

AstroJetson 5y ago
I liked Works. It ran on much less hardware than the Office Suite did. The much lower cost was a big deal too. The reduced feature set was never a big deal, it's not often that I need to put reverse video blink in a Word doc to be printed.
- mbreese 5y ago
  It was probably too much overhead to support Works. You’d still need an engineering team to support Works, and it wasn’t a big money maker. Much better to put some Office features behind a compiler/licensing flag and support one product with different “home” and “professional” SKUs. But I kinda wonder the same thing about Apple’s Pages/Numbers/Keynote. I’m not sure the overhead to maintain those ultimately is worthwhile. It makes me think back on the old ClarisWorks or FileMaker setup where you ostensibly had an external company that made the product, but it was an Apple subsidiary. They could then offer the product for multiple OS’s. I’m not saying that business model was all that successful, but is there a place for an MS works in the time of Google docs?
- blagie 5y ago
  LibreOffice >> Works. Just sayin'

bscphil 5y ago

> Contrary to Google Don't know that I really agree with this. Google does have experimental services and tools that they've killed (RIP Google Reader), but they have always provided migration for their core services. Look at Messaging, for example. Gmail chat -> Hangouts -> Hangouts Chat(?) -> Allo(??) -> Hangouts (again?) -> Android Messages. The problem is not that they leave users completely stranded, the unending shift from app to app for no good reason is itself the problem. And to be clear I do think Google is worse at this than Microsoft is. But the important difference isn't over whether they provide a migration path. Forcing your users to migrate every year or two is bad, regardless of whether the migration is handled "well".

blagie 5y ago
Nope. I've been left stranded by Google over and over. Talk to all the happy GSuite/Free users around now. Or people who developed Chrome Extensions prior to Manifest V3. Or who were banned from Google Fi, Youtube, or your app store of choice by an automated, broken algorithm. Or who developed Workspace Docs prior to mandatory security audits at price points which will break most independent developers. Or.... The key difference is Microsoft has exactly 2 or 3 things on the entire list where any users were left stranded. For Google, you're a statistic. If a change breaks 10,000 small businesses, Google looks at the impact on their bottom line, and goes ahead with the change. Microsoft bends over backwards to NOT do this. AWS as well. It's not that it never happens, but if you've bet on your business on Google, you're basically guaranteed it will happen at one point or another.
- bscphil 5y ago
  I think you're lashing out at Google for a variety of different (and very good!) reasons, but they're outside the range of my comment. People getting banned from Google services because of broken automation is bad, of course, but it has nothing to do with the issue of whether migration paths are provided when services are sunsetted at Google. My point is that for Google's core services, they generally due try to migrate users to a product that provides the same basic features, but that this isn't good enough. Forcing users to migrate because of pointless churn in your app offerings is already the problem, regardless of whether the migrations are handled well. Google is worse than Microsoft in this area not because they leave users stranded (usually), but because they're constantly switching their focus in products like messaging.

taspeotis 5y ago

Yeah like: > Skype for Business Expiring in over 3 years, Skype for Business (formerly Microsoft Lync and Office Communicator) was an enterprise instant messaging software developed by Microsoft as part of the Microsoft Office suite. It was almost 18 years old. It’s still around because of a lengthy transition path Microsoft offers and they admit that and then start talking about it in the past tense…

andylynch 5y ago
Parts are older still. The group chat in later versions of Skype for Business originated at UBS in the nineties by way of Mindalign.
Fissionary 5y ago
It's kinda sad that they're killing SfB. Behind the scenes, it uses SIP and SDP for establishing calls - back in the day at $BigCo, we were developing a software suite for debugging SIP infrastructure, and Skype for Business was surprisingly easy to integrate. Shame that Teams switched to a proprietary Microsoft protocol now.
- simfree 5y ago
  Trouter (Microsoft Teams routing software for video calls and voice calls) crashes and fails to parse SDPs every day, even from Teams clients. I swear it is the least reliable session border controller we interact with, every 2 weeks a new software version is rolled out and new things break while tickets about bugs we filed with Microsoft continue to go ignored.

johnnyanmac 5y ago

>Kinect => It's not dead ??? Is it alive? It very much has an immensely passionate community of students and hobbyists using it in ways well past its intended use (e.g. it's some of the cheapest mocap hardware you can buy). But I don't think you've been able to officially purchase one for 4+ years now. Hard to call that "alive" in a business sense. Honestly a real shame that Xbox hasn't pivoted it into some other team that can market it towards creators. In particular the whole "VTuber" phenomenon may benefit form a cheap(ish), dedicated motion tracking device instead of relying on a high end iPhone or fanagling with some generic webcam.

seanmcdirmid 5y ago
There isn’t much money in selling to creators? And the niche the Kinect had with active gaming has been reliably filled by Meta/Facebook/oculus’s quest, it’s too bad Microsoft didn’t explore that more deeply.
- johnnyanmac 5y ago
  Likely not, not in its current form. I wouldn't be surprised if in 2010 that Kinect was being sold at a significant loss (as is the usual trend in the games industry). They'd need to tweak the device quite a bit to be B2B, but given the success of game engines, asset packs, and other tools I don't think it's impossible. Creators will absolutely pay a premium for such tech when the alternative goes for thousands of dollars (a quick google shows these devices selling on the order of 2000 to 7000+ USD). The SDK alone would generate much more value for such a product. VR definitely killed any interest in the "core" gaming market, but I think the uses of motion tracking is a completely separate audience from VR anyway. Without some dedicated apparel, a VR kit can only track your eyes and hands. motion tracking gives you so much more data to work with, for potentially multiple subjects as well. People working with that data will easily pay themselves back with whatever they develop with it, which is why maybe a licensing deal (similar to Unity/Unreal Engine) may be a better way to monetize .
  - freeone3000 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

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moooo99 5y ago

I am really looking forward to the day Skype for Business finally dies forever. We introduced Teams a few years ago in our org. Back then it was lacking some of the features frequently used in Skype, so you'd have to keep both. Now, years later, about half of the org is still using Skype for no apparent reason. I don't particularly like Teams, primarily because of the excessive resource usage, but it is still better in every way.

Thorrez 5y ago

https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ contains Nexus. That was clearly replaced by Pixel. Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on anything related to this.

syshum 5y ago
No... Sorry just no Nexus line was an Affordable/ value reference implantation of Android Pixel is an overpriced atrocity marketing platform for Google. Pixel IS NOT a replacement for Nexus
- zerocrates 5y ago
  The "a" Pixels are pretty much in the same space as Nexus was.
- Rebelgecko 5y ago
  I think the Nexus 6 cost $50 more than the Pixel 6 does, even before you take inflation into account
  - selcuka 5y ago
    Might be true for Nexus 6, but Nexus 4 was from $299 at launch and had flagship specs. Nexus 5 was $399, again an affordable phone.
  - syshum 5y ago
    The Nexus 6P has the same spec's as the FlagShip Pixel for 1/2 the price
    - Thorrez 5y ago
      6P was $500, Pixel 1 was $650, Pixel 1 XL was $750. https://www.theverge.com/2015/9/29/9410551/google-nexus-6p-announced-size-price-release-date https://www.theverge.com/2015/9/29/9410551/google-nexus-6p-a... https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/google-pixel-review-bland-pricey-but-still-best-android-phone/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/google-pixel-review-...

r3trohack3r 5y ago

My oldest kid is just aging into gaming. We’ve got the Disneyland Adventures game and a Kinect for her. Can confirm, Kinect is dead. You can only get them refurbished now, they’re no longer manufactured. The new consoles no longer support Kinect, we had to dig out an original Xbox One for her. When the Kinect launched, Microsoft had trouble getting a critical mass of players that would attract developers. Without developers adding support to their games, Microsoft had a hard time marketing the device. This led to them bundling it with the Xbox One, but consumers were upset that they were being forced to buy the accessory. I’m impressed they held out as long as they did, but eventually Microsoft caved and removed the Kinect from the bundle and dropped the price of the Xbox One. At that point, the Kinect was essentially dead. They quietly stopped manufacturing them and the new consoles no longer support them (though I’ve heard rumors you can buy 3rd party USB adaptors). It’s a shame. That device is SO much more engaging and approachable for kids than trying to teach them to use a controller.

bluescrn 5y ago
> When the Kinect launched, Microsoft had trouble getting a critical mass of players that would attract developers Developers generally disliked it. It just didn't work well as a game controller. The Wii was much more practical. You still had a controller in your hand with physical buttons, which makes a big difference, and it worked as a fairly accurate pointing device. Those more than made up for the limitations of accelerometer-only motion control.
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  In the early Xbox One days there was a lot of experiments with hybrid controls where you'd still have the controller in your hand, with its accurate joysticks and physical buttons, but have the Kinect sensor for body posture and facial expression and gestures out and away from the controller (and voice recognition). The SDKs had a bunch of interesting things about controller recognition matched to other data. The OS itself would do things like pick out which controller a specific person was holding, and could use that for sign in (among other things). The Xbox One dropped the "controller number ring" from the 360 because it could tell what person was holding the controller rather than needing to signal vice versa which controller a person should hold. There were some interesting Kinect party games that took advantage of this or nearly took advantage of this (hybrid games where maybe everyone would set down controllers for a mini-game and it wouldn't matter that everyone picked up "the right" controller back when the next controller section started). In the end, couch coop that was pretty essential to the 360 just kind of withered away in the Xbox One era (when games like Halo competing on looks with other consoles decided they couldn't afford the frames/resolution costs of split-screen coop anyway) and that missing "controller number indicator" no longer mattered in the end, but in the original plans of the Xbox One the hybrid Kinect/controller gaming support was key to things like couch coop. It's still interesting to wonder about that road not taken if more developers had considered Xbox One hybrid Kinect/controller controls more seriously beyond just the few experiments we did see.

antaviana 5y ago

I remember reading in Steve Jobs biography that when Larry Page became CEO of Google for the second time he reached out to other CEOs in the industry for advice on being a CEO. Jobs advice was to get rid of all the myriad of products and only focus on 3 or 4 key things. If I’m not wrong, spring pruning started with Page as a CEO.

wdr1 5y ago

Oh please. You're cherry picking examples. Did you use Microsoft Foxpro on Mac? I can assure you MS killed it without a migration path. What about the Zune? MS Money? Microsoft Reader?

pjmlp 5y ago

Not always, XNA (C#) => DirectXTK (C++) C++/CX => C++/WinRT (back to ATL / Visual C++ 6.0 dev experience) Form/WPF => UWP (.NET Native / C++/CX / WRL) => WinUI 3.0 (.NET with CsWinRT, C++/WinRT) .NET Framework => .NET Core All of them require rewrites, leave relevant use cases behind, at least they leave the lights running for them to still be targeted, which makes many stubborn to keep using the stuff that actually works.

Kuinox 5y ago
Your migration from .NET Framework to .NET Core required a rewrite? Unless you are doing low level things, I doubt. All ours library and apps survived the migration without a rewrite.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  WCF, Forms/WPF (3rd party controls), Sitecore, SharePoint, Dynamics, SQL Server managed runtime, App Domains,...

dachryn 5y ago

the skype > teams migrations was a costly endeavour for many companies. Sure on paper they give continuity by offering similar services, but in practice the cost to switch to teams is about as high as switching to whatever other solution on the market (Zoom in pole position). The only reason people stuck with teams is because it was forced upon them by the IT departments who preferred teams because it was bundled in their license. Teams was very very very rough in the beginning, compared to zoom and slack. Microsoft doesn't have the guts to call things killed off. And it keeps them in limbo forever. To me that's worse than just admitting you should move on. It's fine if they continue to offer it for business continuity purposes, and they would score many big points doing that. But don't claim they offer it at no cost

randomsearch 5y ago

IoT Core is dead. Can’t recall the details but I wanted to use it and it no longer supports modern platforms.