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Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
261–270 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#262Aces Studio/Microsoft Aces, responsible for the Microsoft Flight Simulator series, shutdown by MS in 2009.
I know this story! I was told approximately the following by someone who used to be on the MS Flight Sim team.
So years ago, Flight Sim was part of Home and Office, but they were in the process of moving over to the gaming division. Back in 2009, the call came throughout Microsoft that teams had to cut a certain % of their head count, it so happened that for Home and Office, the size of the Flight Sim team was about the % of the headcount that needed to be cut.
So the head of Home and Office didn't let the transfer of Flight Sim go through, and instead kept them in the H&O division as a sacrificial lamb. Thus, a perfectly profitable product got cut.
(Division names may be wrong, they change a lot over time)
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#263MySpace - social networking was better back before the facebook "real name" era.
Really? Don't get me wrong, MySpace did have its own thing going on back then, but was filled with creeps and strangers I'd rather not connect with it. When Facebook came about in my freshman year in 2004, it was a breath of freshair....now, not so much.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#264Dr. Dobb's Journal
And Game Developer Magazine... between these two I must have spent a year reading magazines on the toilet.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#265Wunderground. Whatever they've done to the site in the past few years is just terrible.
I think it was bought by IBM which is what screwed it up
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#266Old-school Winamp. I use Spotify these days, but man it was fun to customise skins and play with the awesome visualisers. Half-Life 3 would also be nice, but I guess it was never "around" to begin with.
Ive been using AIMP as a replacement but the universal hotkeys don't seem as universal when you are in certain fullscreen applications.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#267The Sony Ericsson K550i, amazing phone, with a beautiful camera cover which opened the camera app when flipped. Also supported J2ME apps, which was the best part about it.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#268Secret. Good for a quick social interaction but never led to long sessions like FB or Twitter.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#269Google Reader. Now I have a mix of HN, Reddit and GMail, and none of them work really how I like.
Yes this. When I started listening to podcasts years ago, Reader was my primary tool. When Google announced the pending shutdown, I screenshot every part of the app so that I could rebuild it from scratch if needed one day.
Re: Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?
#270Surprised nobody mentioned them yet: Borland and their approach to UI development. I know some of their products live on, but I am nostalgic towards the wysiwyg days of old without being forced to use MS. I of course am aware of modern equivalents, but sadly the market/users moved.