- Microsoft Chart: now just a feature of Excel
- Microsoft Works: seems like you can just replace it with MS Office?
- Windows Photo Viewer: virtually identical to "Photos" on Windows 10, apart from the new UI framework.
- Microsoft Cobol: superseded by Visual Studio which apparently also supports Cobol?
- Microsoft Frontpage: apparently replaced by Microsoft Expression Web, which is itself discontinued
- Microsoft Encarta: I have good memories, but in the age of Wikipedia probably not very profitable
- Microsoft DVD Maker: Kind of sad, but I don't remember the last time I burned a Video DVD
I guess this helps explain why nobody really feels like Microsoft is deprecating a lot of products. Most things on this list are either replaced by something better, not relevant anymore or never really found a market.
Windows Photo Viewer: Indeed, Microsoft has had several iterations of image viewers over the years. They all have nuances and pros/cons. But in the end, not everyone was happy about the "upgrades." WPV was deprecated and articles like this showed up:
https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-get-windows-photo-viewer-...
Works: Works was a free (with new PCs) entry-level office suite. MS Office is of course not free. They are completely separate product lines that happen to share some (but not all) file formats.
Cobol: I believe Visual Studio only supported Cobol starting in 2015. That's a ~20 year absence from the original.
The list shows deprecated products that didn't have a specific drop-in, straightforward upgrade path for the end-user.
MS Office the desktop software isn't free, but you can use the online versions for free[1]. Considering the Works was never quite at feature parity with Word anyway, the gimped down version of Office Online is a decent alternative.
You also have the benefit of not having inconsistencies in file formats, which was always frustrating when working with Works and trying to edit files from Office.
Works was actually a completely separate codebase from an acquisition, and, as a result, many common features actually worked differently from Microsoft Office. This was problematic as it made upgrading from Works to Office difficult as many people who used Works were used to Works and found Office unfamiliar. I have been told by more than one person that they preferred Works to Office over the years.
Microsoft's issue is a little different in that they rarely retire a concept but frequently cycle through implementations. My experience over the years has been less of a Google style "there's no more Reader, where do I go now?" and more "oh, now I have to learn a new but extremely similar app that does the same thing under a different name and set of terms."
This is to me a reminder that Google is more willing to push through newish markets (and sometimes destroy the emerging players as a side effect).
FrontPage getting buried doesn't hit hard because there was already dozen of other more interesting editors, and Frontpage never was the front runner nor did Microsoft really push for it to be the best.
Same for Skype, if tomorrow it was to be sunsetted, it wouldn't be without pain and it will piss a ton of people that use it daily, but that pain would be gone in 2 weeks once they get used to other messaging platforms.
In contrast people are still pissed at Google for many of their buried products that basically took down their market with them, or never get a better replacement.
It is very interesting that concepts like custom emoticons, group voice chat, group chat adminstration, message formatting, all existed in MSN, and all but disappeared from publicly-popular products until Slack, and Discord came up.
Skype, when WLM was shut down, was _very_ primitive in its communication options, let alone moderation tools. Sure, things like TeamSpeak and whatnot existed for organized voice chat, but that's not something my mother would be able to use. Skype didn't even have group voice calls back then, let alone video. Emoticons are still limited to the standard ones (or nowadays, seasonal sponsored emoticons), group chat moderation is limited to text commands with no accompanying visual interface (it is not even possible to show who is a group's moderator or owner). Heck, Discord and alike still don't even allow multi-window messaging!
Not to mention the client itself never lasted more than a couple years without a full interface redesign.
Of course, in an ideal world I'd love for some sort of standard interface that allowed me to locally confederate all my services, but sadly Slack and Discord both have TOS rules that require the use of _their_ client, even though their bot APIs are basically feature-complete.
There are quite a few examples of this, both industry wide and specifically from MS. Sometimes it is due to the first implementation being bad, sometimes it is that some part of the tech simply isn't quite ready (or isn't yet quite cheap enough for mass adoption), sometimes it is solving a problem that at the time is very niche but later becomes a more common need.
Think tablets. Anyone else remember MS's big "pen computing" push with tablet & hybrid style PCs that were too heavy, ran too warm, and didn't have batteries that lasted long enough? Or in a similar vain, more general and arguably more successful in their time, PDAs which died out but our phones basically now fill the same role.
Yeah, the “enterprise” product lineage is more Live Communicator -> Office Communicator -> Lync -> Skype for Business (kinda direct link to, even though it’s SaaS only) -> Teams
From what I hear the Lead Architect of Teams used to work on Lync. So I can easily agree that Teams is a child of Lync. Some things are improved though I hear a lot of people having issues with Teams sadly.
Teams is supposed to be the replacement. It's kind of trash as an instant messenger client, for entirely interface-related reasons - they built it in Electron, so it is difficult to pop out separate windows for individual chats, so one is stuck with tabbed soup.
Although it's probably the best voip and video conferencing software they have put out.
There's also a lot of really weird niche products in the business software list, like the Microsoft Stat Pack (literally just some government data on a CD-ROM), or Dynamics RMS Headquarters (a set of tools for managing a retail business).
Microsoft Works was always an odd duck -- a cut-down relative of Office (except not actually Office) for home users. Merging this into Office was a sensible decision that should have happened many years ago, TBH.
Not when you understand the economics/operation of 1980s desktop software.
Multitasking OSes? Nope - not in the early-mid 1980s.
You want to use another app? Save your work, quit your current app and launch the new app.
Cooperative multitasking eventually arrived, but if you didn't have enough RAM, it would be painful to switch amongst multiple apps.
Then there's the cost of the apps. You want a word processor? ~$250. Spreadsheet? Another ~$250. Presentation app? guess what? Another ~$250.
Or you can buy one of these new-fangled integrated apps that include word processor, spreadsheet, graphics, database and some other stuff. These integrated apps were jack-of-all-trades going for the 80% functionality that people needed. All for the price of one of the dedicated apps.
AppleWorks, MS Works, Ashton-Tate Framework filled a need at the low end.
There were always going to be users who didn't want/need the full functionality of a typical dedicated word processor/spreadsheet or didn't want to pay for features they didn't need/use.
Once Excel was fleshed out and MS bought Powerpoint, the Office suite of apps was born, priced at less than the total cost of the 3 individual apps.
The standalone desktop apps were living on borrowed time.
Actually some things were better in Works, I especially remember being able to embed parts of a spreadsheet seemlessly into a text processor document and be able to update it one place. That was amazing back in 1995.
Also there was Microsoft Expression Web, also EOL.
I’m remembering a deal Microsoft made with Adobe to stop making Microsoft Expression products in exchange for more platform support, or something. I forget the details.
One of the Mac Works coders here: A slight correction. Works for the Mac was published in 1986, not 1988.
AppleWorks for the Apple II was written by Rupert Lissner of Scotts Valley, CA for Apple Computer. AppleWorks was released early in 1984 and was written in 6502 assembler. At that time, Steve Jobs was really anxious to have software on the new Macintosh computer that would make it appealing to business users. Lissner and Jobs discussed porting AppleWorks to the Macintosh.
Lissner teamed up with former IBM salesman and Apple exec Don Williams of Santa Cruz, CA to begin work on the Mac version. Don Williams was the creator of Desktop Plan and Graph'N'Calc for the IBM PC. Their company was named Productivity Software. Within months, AppleWorks became very successful so Lissner decided he didn't need to work on the Mac version. He dropped out without writing any code.
At that time I (Michael Watson) was hired as their first employee. Williams then hired Brian Haas to write the word processor and Tim Lundeen to write the spreadsheet. I wrote the database. Lundeen and I wrote the core code to integrate the modules. Later, Ben Halpern was hired to write the drawing and charting code. We wrote it in 68000 assembler and called it "MouseWorks."
In 1986, Bill Gates visited us in Santa Cruz and a deal was struck where Microsoft would publish our program as Microsoft Works for the Macintosh. Microsoft was working on Excel for the Mac, but it wasn't ready and they wanted something on the Mac.
Lundeen dropped out before it was published in a dispute with Williams. Haas, Halpern and myself finished it up. It was published in the fall of 1986. We did two more versions, then Microsoft bought us all out and took over in 1993.
AppleWorks for the Macintosh by Apple was called ClarisWorks and became a competitor, although not a significant one.
It's not the same because Google's products are all (or at least mostly?) services, whereas many of the Microsoft products listed are simple releases with no continuing support required for them to still work (e.g. 3D Movie Maker).
"Killed" (can't use it anymore), vs. "Discontinued" (might stop working on new operating systems at some point in the future).
This is actually a great point, and one thing that has me skeptical of Stadia and other upcoming game-streaming services.
People who never got rid of their NES can still play their games. If it breaks, they could buy another one, or maybe even try to fix it themselves.
Once a service shuts down, you don't really have anything to keep or to revisit. If there was a Stadia-only game in the future, could you somehow get a copy and run it on local hardware to keep playing if Stadia shut down? Could you do it easily.
Super Mario Bros, Classic Tetris, etc. they still have active communities of speed-runners, tournaments, etc. It's kind of weird that something with the level of cultural impact a videogame can have could all of a sudden disappear because it doesn't exist anywhere but in a centralized space outside the control of the people who experienced it.
Satellaview [1] was a "game streaming" service for SNES games in Japan way back when. Sure, it was more like the "game passes" of today, in that you paid a subscription to be able to access games for limited time.
Back then the games were actually sent and stored to the user's device, and played from there, with additional content in the form of high-quality music and audio streamed if you played in the correct times of day.
Now, since the games themselves have been backed-up by conscious individuals, the streamed data was inaccessible, which renders a bunch of the games practically unplayable since the company shut the service down.
Software developers have discovered that people are bad at measuring value and they are bad at delivering additional value over time. Subscriptions always cost more and force a decision every year.
I play Super Mario brothers on my old Nintendo every couple of years. No revenue has been realized since 1986 or whatever. Just a payment for the NES and game.
Today, you can get unlimited access to virtually all music made in the last century or every show made by Disney ever for less than a subscription to some goofy text editor.
If you have an hour, I'd highly recommend giving this a watch. It is really sad to see any form of media die forever at the whim of a corporation. Games are especially prone to this unfortunately
True, but Microsoft has plenty of these too. Look at the specific list of retired Microsoft websites and services. There's a lot of them (69 to be exact):
Microsoft Windows is not on the list because it had direct descendent upgrades. 95 to 98 to XP etc provided a smooth upgrade experience for the end-user.
Works and Office were completely different product lines, and Works was free for the vast majority of its users, while Office was obviously not. It's not apples to apples.
COBOL was not in Visual Studio for ~20 years. Someone in 1996 couldn't have just fired up Visual Studio for Cobol after it was deprecated back then.
Yea, but going through the list, a lot of the products are vain rebrands. Some of which still exist in one form or another. Some haven't exactly died either, they were just absorbed into "bigger" products.
Though, RT being put out to pasture.... I had to develop an app for that arbitrary lockout piece of trash. Whoever thought of RT and whoever approved it, deserves a life-long raging case of crabs and... like... a monthly visit of dysentery.
The list specifically lists products that didn't have a specific drop-in upgrade path. So the rebrands are different products that users had to make a decision about purchasing their successor (if there was one) or go with a competitor.
At least some of these products had free replacements, or replacements that were bundled with future versions of windows. Microsoft Internet Explorer is on the list, and I'm pretty sure its replacement (Edge) costs nothing.
That's an interesting statistic, but it's difficult to compare the two apples-to-apples. Most of Microsoft's discontinued products cost actual money to purchase. Most of the Google discontinued products were free.
In addition, many of the Google products listed are essentially acqui-hires. Products with limited user base. Microsoft has very few of those. So if you wanted to really do a full analysis, those would be some things to examine. It would be really interesting to see.
You’re painting this in a very biased light. When MS discontinued Software X people who paid for it could maybe even use it to this day. Some of that software was also a one time release with no maintenance to speak of. And most other pieces of software just had the functionality rolled into a bigger suite (with or without a gap in between) because it made sense.
Comparing this to killing a service is not a fair way to put it. The fact that they were acqui-killings as a justification or consolation is a bit of a stretch. The difference between killing a service and abandoning (discontinuing) a product is not just one of semantics, it’s huge.
You're correct, they did discontinue/killed a lot of stuff. I just noticed you insist on painting them in a much worse light throughout the discussion compared to how you paint Google. And you don't consider that MS is also exactly twice the age of Google (22 extra years to discontinue/kill products and services).
I know whoever brought Google in the discussion was engaging in a bit of whataboutism but I think we can agree that while MS has some big failures (Windows Phone/Mobile sized), they are not standing out among other big names in the industry and are nowhere near as egregious with the practice as Google.
I feel as if Microsoft has released overall far more products than Google, though I don't have a resource on hand to substantiate that claim. I think the statistic is only valuable if it's killed-per-released product.
Might be worth comparing the ratio of killed products vs. supported products as well, instead of just the absolute number for the number of killed products. I dont have any data to back up this assertion, but i have a feeling that this ratio would differ very significantly between Google and MSFT.
We should compare the time between officially discountinued and no longer usable. For Google products it's the same date but I did and do use MS products long after they are killed off*
* Image Composer, MS Money, Media Center, Movie Maker, WinDIff, Web Matrix, Silverlight, the list goes on...
"The project was announced by MSN UK on April 30, 2003, and was widely ridiculed before being declared a hoax by Microsoft on May 12. On May 13, another Microsoft press release stated that although the project had not been a hoax, it had been cancelled because it would do little to promote the MSN brand."
That thing was terrible, but I'm kinda sad that a Microsoft Bob-like window manager (or whatever you want to call it) never panned out.
Yes, it blows for productivity, but it had "personality" - it was colorful and silly unlike your average UI today which either looks "industrial" or subscribes to the "everything is flat and bland" school of thought.
The majority of county boards of elections in Ohio are using a voter registration management application that is still written in Visual FoxPro (and still uses DBF files as the back-end).
Aside: It has a recently-added ToTP implementation that replaces their prior "scan a barcode" system of "two factor" authentication. Of course, you can just open the DBF files directly in another tool and manipulate them w/o any "authentication". The mind boggles.
Direct DBF manipulation is small potatoes. Since the database container (.DBC) has to be writable to be of much use, use that same tool to add some triggers that will run whatever FoxPro code you want (which can call just about any Win32 API you want). If you’ve got FoxPro installed, skip the hex editor and open the DBC like a table (it is a DBF). If one is going to use DBFs, skip the database container feature if you can. It was a good idea maybe 25 years ago (umm, not really), but it was a different time and long before Microsoft started getting their security shit together.
Still using it, but most of our major applications have been ported to .NET / SQL Server.
That being said, still some 50+ smaller / departmental style applications that continue to work, and will likely keep running in their current form for the next 10+ years.
In fact, someone asked me a random foxpro question in the middle of typing this comment haha.
The more irritating thing Microsoft does is churn on their SDKs. I think there are at least a half dozen different ways I can generate a SOAP client from a WSDL, for instance. Or some of the abortive and competing UI layers; UWP vs WPF vs WinForms vs ATL vs MFC and so on.
Silverlight was probably the most painful. I've known some companies that made big bets on that technology, and most of them were caught flat-footed when it was announced that it would be discontinued.
I still sorely miss Microsoft Money and have found Quicken/et al to be terrible alternatives. Any recommendations? Strongly prefer offline entirely, and would be happy if it's cross-platform and can import standard bank statement exports.
The frustrating bit to me is when they bought up Creature House Expression (A Vector art application) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_House_Expression rebadged it as a Microsoft product and then killed it. It was a really great vector tool in it's time. Buying up software companies and then killing the software is a problem we rarely talk about. AutoDesk has also done this with Softimage XSI, which, ironically Microsoft used to own as well.
Two things stood out to me: I really liked Sunrise and nothing seems to have done a good replacement of it. The other thing is that I really miss the Windows 95-style UIs for some reason. The UIs were generally responsive and the tooltips popped up quickly. I miss bland highly ordered rows of icons.
The distinction: S Mode can be enabled/disabled by an admin on any Windows 10 system, as a toggle in Settings. S Edition was briefly sold as if it was a different product or different version of Windows; to disable it one would need to purchase Windows 10 Home or Windows 10 Pro, and there was no way to reenable it.
A lot of these disconnected products have pretty much direct replacements with slightly different names, same functionality, and probably even data continuity. Or were hardly separate products to begin with.
Which ones? Products are only on the list if they didn't have direct descendant drop-in replacements that were straightforward for the user to upgrade.
Doesn't mention Platform Builder, a tool for creating embedded projects. Just a wizard really, stapled onto an old version of Visual Studio. Didn't do much - select from a very limited list of drivers and chip support to start your project.
I still use Microsoft Money every day. It’s great! There’s nothing like it available now. Runs on the desktop, no internet needed. All data stays on my machine. Ledger, scheduled bills, and cash flow forecast are all I need.
Appears to be missing "Microsoft Delta" version control system.
Also Microsoft's pre-Excel spreadsheet offering, "Microsoft Multiplan".
Also missing Xenix.
Isn't clear how they define "product". For example Cardfile is listed but that was never a standalone product just a program bundled with Windows. If they are going to include discontinued Windows components, there are a lot of those. (And discontinued components or features of other products too, like Office or SQL Server.)
I still miss Sunrise. Outlook calendar doesn’t compete last time I checked, so I’ve been using Fantastical plus some other integrations for special calendar subscriptions.
I see that IronRuby is there. They should also add IronPython to that list. That has been dead for a while now. It hasn't progressed since version 2.7.9 from 2018.
which is a darn shame. I think the lack of cffi support really hindered IronPython from catching on. the marshalling of data types was incredibly smooth and pleasant to use, and it was quite performant, but cffi is an indirect dependency of so many Python libraries that I couldn't use it for much besides "hello world."
The MS product I miss the most is Midtown Madness 2, with San Francisco and London. It was the best city racing game I ever played, it had the best game mechanics, it was fast but easily maneuverable, games nowadays require hard training to run one minute without hitting into something. The maps and cars available were very entertaining and I remember freely downloading a lot of vehicles of very different types.
The one that caught my eye was 3D movie maker. When I was young my siblings and I really had fun with it.
Basically there was a background, and you could add characters to it and make them move, rotate, scale, and do premade animations. Then you'd add music and sound effects. It seemed very cutting edge to us at the time.
My local Children's Museum had a PC running Musical Instruments for years. I loved playing around with it; easily the only Microsoft software I've ever felt strongly about (in a non-negative way, anyway).
They should open source the Basic 7.1 compiler and push to make it cross-platform. It was procedural, but super fast. Also not interpreted. It compiled and linked, just like a C compiler.
- Microsoft Chart: now just a feature of Excel - Microsoft Works: seems like you can just replace it with MS Office? - Windows Photo Viewer: virtually identical to "Photos" on Windows 10, apart from the new UI framework. - Microsoft Cobol: superseded by Visual Studio which apparently also supports Cobol? - Microsoft Frontpage: apparently replaced by Microsoft Expression Web, which is itself discontinued - Microsoft Encarta: I have good memories, but in the age of Wikipedia probably not very profitable - Microsoft DVD Maker: Kind of sad, but I don't remember the last time I burned a Video DVD
I guess this helps explain why nobody really feels like Microsoft is deprecating a lot of products. Most things on this list are either replaced by something better, not relevant anymore or never really found a market.