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Killed by Microsoft

killedbymicrosoft.info

131–140 of 349 posts

Re: Killed by Microsoft

#131
post #76

It's missing Atom editor, it was my favorite text editor, now it's abandoned to death on github. They stop working on it the day they bought Github. I still remember Nat Friedman here in the comment section saying he won't stop developing Atom. He didn't even keep on his promise for a week.

Atom is the only Electron app I'm a fan of. Even VS Code is pretty meh in my opinion. I wish it continued to receive significant updates and performance improvements, and maintained a lot of the user share still. It would be awesome editor. Nowadays, Emacs is a wonder. If what you want is a "hackable text editor for the 21st century" then Emacs delivers on that very well.

Re: Killed by Microsoft

#132
post #127

So many discontinued Microsoft products not listed: Xenix, Microsoft OS/2, Multiplan, Microsoft COBOL, Microsoft Fortran/PowerStation, Microsoft Pascal/QuickPascal, the classic Microsoft Basic line (BASIC/BASICA/GW-BASIC/QuickBASIC/QBASIC/PDS/VBDOS), MS-DOS, MSX-DOS, Microsoft Adventure, Microsoft Decathlon, Z-80 SoftCard, Microsoft Delta (the version control system), Windows NT OS/2 subsystem, Presentation Manager f…

How many of these would there even be a market for? Some of these are games from the 70's and 80's.

> How many of these would there even be a market for?

True, but you can make the same point about much of the more recent software/services on this page – there probably isn't much market for them either. (Surely, if they'd succeeded in the market, Microsoft would not have killed them, so the fact Microsoft killed them is evidence of their market failure.)

Re: Killed by Microsoft

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice list! You forgot Microsoft hardware, too. Do they still make webcams? The Z-80 soft card? And what about the software they made for the Apple 2e?

I did mention one hardware product in my list – Z-80 SoftCard (expansion card for Apple IIs which had an embedded Z80 CPU so they could run CP/M software) Yes they still sell webcams: https://www.microsoft.com/en-ww/accessories/products/webcams... I don't think Microsoft had many software products for Apple IIs. A large part of the point of the Z-80 SoftCard was that then their CP/M 8080/Z80 product line would run on…

There were at least two video games published by Microsoft for the Apple 2 series: Microsoft Decathalon, Microsoft Adventure, maybe others.

Re: Killed by Microsoft

#134

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. Application…

> 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 th…

[deleted]

Re: Killed by Microsoft

#135
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

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.

Re: Killed by Microsoft

#136
post #50

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 al…

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…

Parts are older still. The group chat in later versions of Skype for Business originated at UBS in the nineties by way of Mindalign.

Re: Killed by Microsoft

#137
post #33
post #6

Is there a similar list for google? 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.

RIP Google Inbox.

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.

Re: Killed by Microsoft

#138
I miss a lot of this stuff. It's odd the emotional attachment I have to software. It's almost like how pictures or smells take you back to moment in time, thinking about old software does that for me.

I used to use Zune with music pass every day. Thinking about that interface now reminds me of my first job and working on startups in my spare time -- probably the happiest and wildest time of my life. Like most of my generation MSN Messenger was another I used every day. That reminds me of school, friends and teenage heartache. Windows Phone 7 was the OS of my first smart phone. It reminds me specifically of being 19, sitting at my girlfriend's kitchen table playing angry birds at 3am while eating a bowl of cereal. Windows Media Center reminds me of the hot summer nights I'd spend at my teenage girlfriend's house watching films on her XP MCE computer.

Re: Killed by Microsoft

#139

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.

Re: Killed by Microsoft

#140
post #7
post #6

Is there a similar list for google? 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://killedbygoogle.com/

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.

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