3 ms·

Microsoft is a bulti-billion dollar company that doesn't much care for developers and users of its products. Oh, it says it cares, and for the incremental cost

• CRASCH 14y ago
  I wish that was the complete list of EOL products from MS.
  • i386 14y ago
    Heres the list of discontinued software products http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Microsoft_software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Microsoft...
• jmspring 14y ago
  Silverlight dead? Funny, desktop / laptop machines still require it for Netflix -- not a small audience. OS/2? Learn your history, MSFT helped create it, but it was an IBM product. XBox Live? Last I checked it was still around. I'm not a particularly MSFT oriented person (apple household) but having been around long enough, you might want to expand your horizons around MSFT product life cycles. And, I very much disagree with your comment of "It will always suck to be a developer using MSFT technologies" ... Assorted MSFT technologies have made developers a lot of money over the years and I don't see that changing much in the next few years. Yes, they lag at mobile, but they are pretty damn big still.
  • yuhong 14y ago
    >OS/2? Learn your history, MSFT helped create it, but it was an IBM product. Actually, MS did once bet on OS/2. It is unfortunate that what was originally the MS OS/2 2.0 SDK turned into an entire fiasco. I really should write a blog series about it. In the meantime, look up "MS OS/2 2.0 SDK" and "Microsoft Munchkins OS/2".
    • jmspring 14y ago
      They bet on it for a short while, but I was referencing the fact that they hopped ship and OS/2 continued under IBM for years. OS/2 Warp, continuing to run in ATM machines, the community wanting to continue OS/2, etc. It did eventually die, but it maintained a life well after MSFT decided to move on. I still miss Galactic Civilizations. One of the better space strategy games.
      • scrumper 14y ago
        An aside: GC2 is a fine successor. DRM-free, too. http://www.galciv2.com/ http://www.galciv2.com/
        • eru 14y ago
          I tried that. But the original Master of Orion still beats it.
      • yuhong 14y ago
        > OS/2 continued under IBM for years. And meanwhile MS was attacking OS/2 using unethical tactics like "Microsoft Munchkins" that ended up being worse than working with IBM (under the JDA) in the first place.
      • richardw 14y ago
        I might write that as "IBM continued to try to fulfil promises to their customers for years despite their major partner jumping ship".
  • k3n 14y ago
• Delmania 14y ago
  Your list is not accurate. Vista became Windows 7 & 8, OneCare became Security Essentials, Live is still around, Visual Basic is VB.NET, and I am sure there are more of those technologies. LINQ to SQL is like Silverlight - it's not being actively developed, but you can still use it. "In the end, it will always suck to be a developer using Microsoft technology." Just like in free software, it depends on what you learn. The Microsoft technologies I use at work are C#, F#, ASP.NET, and IIS. Those aren't going away anytime soon.
• wbkang 14y ago
  COM is not even close to being dead. Credibility--
• WayneDB 14y ago
  * ActiveX, COM and COM+ are all still widely used. * Courier Tablet was never even a product. * DAO was useful for over a decade and you can still write programs that use it today if you want to. Plenty of people do. * DDE still works, matter of fact - perusing the list of hot questions on StackOverflow I saw a question about it today. * Encarta was a developer product? * Expression/Suite still works and is now available for free! Blend being rolled into Visual Studio? Great! * Frontpage still works and you can even still buy it new, here you go - http://www.discountmountainsoftware.com/mifrpa.html http://www.discountmountainsoftware.com/mifrpa.html * Linq to SQL still works, I just used it in a small project the other day. * Visual FoxPro made a lot of money for a lot of people and programs built with it still run on Windows 8. I know a company that just paid $50K for a program written in Visual FoxPro. Yeah, I'm sure the original developers hate Microsoft. * Many of the other products you mentioned were transformed into something else. So, what's the problem? Don't like change?
  • teyc 14y ago
    On the other hand this is the other side of the equation: 1. As platform evolves, a system built on a dead product is itself a dead end. 2. Developers skills are also dead ended. 3. All the supporting products (build systems, test systems) are also dead ended. We seem to reinvent new ways to do old things (forms, validation, saving to database), and this is very wasteful. Part of the reason why the web has grown up so much is that it has enough time to evolve. I just saw WebStorm and it was amazing. You know what? This is possible because the browser as a platform has enormous incentive to maintain backward compatibility.
  • yuhong 14y ago
    DAO in fact is still developed today as part of ACE, and has been since Access 2007.
• i386 14y ago
  3D Movie Maker was a Microsoft Kids product released around 1996. Not a developer product.