Microsoft only sabotaged, then bought Nokia's mobile phone division. The rest of Nokia is doing fine making networking equipment and various other things.
MSTE is my daily-driver, I've stocked up on spares in the event of failures. One had been so regularly used it's worn the paint off where my palm rests on it. NOTHING comes close it's excellent design (and I've got a bin FULL of pretenders-to-the-throne).
After 20 years, i used up my cache of MSTE's. I've found the "Elecom M-HT1UR" to be a suitable replacement, the only issue i have with it is the "wheel button" actuations are all too close together. "wheel click" is also "wheel left/right" too often.
I like seeing the list of services, but I wish it was called "Microsoft Graveyard" instead of "Killed by Microsoft". Some of those wouldn't be around today regardless of the controlling organization, such as Silverlight and Encarta. To me, "Killed by Microsoft" makes it sound like Microsoft chose to discontinue a product that otherwise would still be "alive" today.
It isn't even fair to say that some of these products are dead. For example, you can still use Microsoft Streets & Trips today, as it's from an era when you bought (rather than rented) software. It's just not getting any more updates, so its usefulness diminishes as the road network changes.
That doesn’t really change the fact that what was called EdgeHTML is gone and it was replaced by a program that has an entirely different lineage, API, user interface, feature set... I am definitely aware of WebView2, I even maintain bindings for it for Go!
Your point is well taken. Apple got a few good blows back at Microsoft.
When I first saw the title "Killed by Microsoft" I thought it was a list of products from other companies that Microsoft killed - not products from Microsoft that Microsoft ended.
"Microsoft Graveyard" is a better name given Microsoft's history of killing other companies and their products. Or make the list really products that Microsoft killed. That would be a much longer list.
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.
The "killed by microsoft" site looks like a rip off of the well known "killed by google" site. Id day that they really try to push fake controversy and extend the list e.g. Microsoft Edge just switched its technology and still exists.
The earliest commits from fabianoriccardi include git messages like:
> replacing "Google" with "Microsoft", removed PressCoverage
Anyway, great code recycling at least right? It's a fun thought that the author of killedbygoogle ultimately wrote most of the code on killed-by-microsoft.
Hi! Creator of Killed by Google. The code that runs Killed by Google has always been licensed under MIT, and it's changed significantly since the Microsoft version was cloned. There are multiple 'clones' that have popped up over the years using my repo as the base, and Fabiano is one of the few who kept my license in tact. The Microsoft version has been around for over a year, I think.
I agree that it is cool to see how it's been reused. :)
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.
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.
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.
How did microsoft academic compare to researchgate/google scholar??
Very sad I only hear about it now...
I mean it's so absurd that people care enough to build websites like killed by microsoft and killed by google but yet no one built a alive by microsoft and alive by google. Where can I find an exhaustive and succinct/bullshit free timeline of their products launches + short, to the point description?
Microsoft academic was imo much better. Instead of just entering words into a text field, you also had tags like biology or chemistry that you could include or exclude. Sure you can manually do that even now with say Scopus but the ML stuff was really handy. Google scholar doesn't have any such tags or topics fields unfortunately.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It seemed to be a rebrand or rewrite ... but it was never the same and I gave up on it.
Haven't tried it recently so cannot remember the features they dropped, but was damned annoying. Wunderlist was fine. MS Todo was basically the same without some key features that I used.
I gave up on it considering the developer timescale was snail pace...
How tf do the big boys get "todo" so wrong?
Google completely fluffed Google Tasks ... despite it having some really impressive features like "add email to tasks", best implementation I've seen of it. Which is a shame as the rest of the To do app is not worth anyones time.
I'm evaluating todo apps and most of the easily accessible opinion/info is shitty listicles or shitty YouTube self-help gurus. Out of curiosity, what were the key dropped Wunderlist->ToDo features? I do hear a lot of people appreciate the MS ToDo "My Day" feature and know a lot of people were annoyed by the switch, but assumed it was a general distaste for MS rather than specific features.
I have weird enough needs I was planning to use an open source CalDAV server, OS native clients and local push notification app for the parts the native apps don't support... but the FOSS CalDav server space is kind of rough right now.
Wunderlist was acquired and killed because it would have been better than Microsoft Todo. They promised to implement a few features and pocketed some customers.
Microsoft Todo was started by the Wunderlist team. It was a ground up rewrite for whatever reasons made sense to that team at the time, but Todo didn't exist until after the Wunderlist acquisition.
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.
Missing: Microsoft Bookshelf [1]. Encarta was a somewhat similar product, but the reference sources in Bookshelf were arguably better. For example, Bookshelf contained the unabridged American Heritage Dictionary, while Encarta used (I think) a Webster's dictionary [2].
I still use Bookshelf 1996 on most days of the week.
I'm a professor. I write a lot, and I use Bookshelf 1996 mainly for the third edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, which is great. The interface is better than the interface for the iOS app.
You can get the 4th edition for free at https://ahdictionary.com, and it's good. I'm just old-fashioned enough to dislike some of the changes that they made between the third and fourth editions.
No need for a VM. I'm running Windows 10. Setup is easy if you still have a drive that can read CDs: just mount the ISO (for example, with ImgBurn), copy all of the files to your SSD, and run AAMSSTP\APP\BSHELF96.EXE. The registry is never touched, so it's a very portable installation.
I suppose that the ability to run this nearly-30-year-old program with ease is testament to Microsoft's commitment to backward compatibility. And if I wanted, I could probably run it straight from the CD, as people did back in 1996.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Google list is absolutely aiming to shame Google. They break promises they made even just a few months earlier (Stadia is a recent example).
Microsoft is a polar opposite: they kill unpopular things, monetize popular things, and provide ridiculously long support (and backwards compatibility).
> The suit, originally filed back in October 2020 and moved to a New York federal court last week, alleges that Google, alongside developers Bungie and id Software, stated that the Stadia service would feature 4K resolution support, but did not walk back or correct this statement once it was openly reported that Stadia was upscaling several titles from resolutions such as 1080p and 1440p, rather than offering “true” 4K resolution.
That's one flimsy ass lawsuit. Upscaled 4K for some titles ( admitted by Google themselves) is still 4K.
For the game library, did Google promise they'll have every game on it? What promise was broken? They worked with game developers directly, paying to get games ported ( be it indie or Ubisoft/EA/Rockstar). They should have done more, but it's not like Stadia was advertised as "the platform you can play all games on" and then it turned out you only have 20 games.
They are no longer making their own games or even trying to make it into a viable consumer product. They pivoted to a B2B product. It's only a matter of time before they just kill off the consumer-facing version.
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.
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.
Wut? N900 was the best, most reliable, highest quality and most polished phone I have ever owned. It's not even close. How they f.ed that up is beyond me.
The big problem was just app support. Everyone was writing apps for Android and iOS and maybe Windows or Symbian, but that was about it. Since many of these apps aren't something you can re-create yourself (WhatsApp, banking apps, whatnot) so that hugely diminished its usefulness, especially since this is when everyone and their mother was using WhatsApp, which never made a Maemo app.
This problem is even worse now. We're back where we started in ~2000 with Windows.
People write apps for platforms with the largest market shares, apple & droid. Not news. N900 never got the support to get market share. It could have though, the quality was there and they had a huge selling point. If it did the world would be a better place with better software on your phone and less spyware. Not what we got though, huh? We got Apple and Google in the race to who can smash the userbase harder with no meaningful alternative and fringe phones trying to catch up to where the 900 comfortably was a decade ago. Apple and Goog are both looking at each other and thinking "You guys doing that and actually getting away with it? Amazing! Well we'll just go even further!" And the only place where customers rights or welfare is ever even remotely served is where it happens to align with smashing a competitor and is absolutely incidental to their strategy beyond some marketing. It's nuts. The N900 was better in every single way, polish, stability everything. Got smashed by executive decision. You could build conspiracy theories around it if we didn't have such a rich history of total and complete incompetence to draw on and be a more likely explanation.
N900 was really cool device in many ways, but polished or reliable it definitely was not; when I had one, I tended to carry a feature phone along with it because N900 was so ridiculously buggy and unreliable.
Hey, me too! I got myself a Huawei feature phone, probably their first offering in the North American market.
It blows my mind you can buy Huawei phones for $1000+. The feature phone I bought for $50 literally disintegrated in my hands after a couple months of use.
Until I lost mine in a taxi it was easily the best, most polished and most reliable phone I've ever owned. More reliable than any iPhone I've owned. More reliable than any droid I've owned. In terms of calls connecting, not dropping out, the OS not crashing in the middle of calls - all of which have happened to me with Apple and Google's (Samsung's) gear. That was my experience that I'm having as hard a time reconciling with yours as you probably are with mine.
There are great links at the bottom of that page to Tomi Ahonen's exhaustive coverage of Microsoft's destruction of Nokia's lucrative, profitable business model.
Ahonen's data was highly accurate and was being presented in a very compelling way in real time as the Microsoft-Nokia shitstorm was unfolding. He had already left Nokia years earlier so didn't have any direct skin in the game, but he did have an uncanny record of mobile phone industry insider knowledge, data, and contacts inside Nokia, Apple, Google, Samsung, Motorola, and a long list of carriers worldwide. The reports he generated were considered the "bible" for executives.
You are entitled to your opinion that Nokia was somehow "on its way down before Microsoft" but the facts are that Nokia was profitable and had products that were award-winning but never saw the light of day thanks to Stephen Elop's blundering and Steve Balmer's meddling. Ahonen laid down those facts back then. For anyone wishing to have a fuller, rounder understanding of Nokia's demise under Microsoft, take the time to delve into those links at the bottom of:
Maybe they’ve changed, but their strategy seemed to be to take something already dead, give it a jolt and Weekend at Bernie’s it under a new name until it starts to smell, then give it a jolt…
E.g. , plays for sure, Zune Music, Groove music, Xbox music. Also Communicator, Lync, Skype, Teams etc.
Ya, it seems less that they killed it, and more so they just rebranded or released a successor product. Microsoft mobile wasn't killed, it was replaced by windows phone.
348 comments
[ 576 ms ] story [ 7535 ms ] thread*Microsoft Active Azure Graveyard for Products - Enterprise Edition 2022 .Net
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/edge-ie-mode
[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/
When I first saw the title "Killed by Microsoft" I thought it was a list of products from other companies that Microsoft killed - not products from Microsoft that Microsoft ended.
"Microsoft Graveyard" is a better name given Microsoft's history of killing other companies and their products. Or make the list really products that Microsoft killed. That would be a much longer list.
The only difference is .info vs .com .
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.
https://github.com/fabianoriccardi/killed-by-microsoft is not a fork, but it has many of the commits from 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/graph... https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle/graphs/contribut...
I agree that it is cool to see how it's been reused. :)
"Just" is a severe understatement, especially because they switched to the monoculture.
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.
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.
Basic features still work:
https://support.xbox.com/en-GB/help/games-apps/my-games-apps...
I tried to Skype with relatives recently and the application ground my (recent, powerful) machine completely to a halt. It was insane.
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.
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
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.
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
I still use Bookshelf 1996 on most days of the week.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bookshelf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta_Webster%27s_Dictionary
You can get the 4th edition for free at https://ahdictionary.com, and it's good. I'm just old-fashioned enough to dislike some of the changes that they made between the third and fourth editions.
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.
1996?
More like 1987: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBupNdYe08g
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
Microsoft is a polar opposite: they kill unpopular things, monetize popular things, and provide ridiculously long support (and backwards compatibility).
The subpar game library is another.
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.
??
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.
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.
This problem is even worse now. We're back where we started in ~2000 with Windows.
It blows my mind you can buy Huawei phones for $1000+. The feature phone I bought for $50 literally disintegrated in my hands after a couple months of use.
Towards the end of its life with me, it would soft reboot whenever someone called me.
https://mobilesyrup.com/2014/08/14/ex-nokia-exec-tomi-ahonen...
There are great links at the bottom of that page to Tomi Ahonen's exhaustive coverage of Microsoft's destruction of Nokia's lucrative, profitable business model.
They prioritised hardware over software. Maintained multiple OS’s. Made lots of stupid derisions.
You are entitled to your opinion that Nokia was somehow "on its way down before Microsoft" but the facts are that Nokia was profitable and had products that were award-winning but never saw the light of day thanks to Stephen Elop's blundering and Steve Balmer's meddling. Ahonen laid down those facts back then. For anyone wishing to have a fuller, rounder understanding of Nokia's demise under Microsoft, take the time to delve into those links at the bottom of:
https://mobilesyrup.com/2014/08/14/ex-nokia-exec-tomi-ahonen...
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.