Killed by Microsoft
161–170 of 349 posts
Re: Killed by Microsoft
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Teams is unbelievably shit though. It’s like they don’t even care.
The sysadmin experience on Windows is hot garbage, too. I assume the people writing it have had less than no experience dealing with deploying software to fleets of PCs, hot-desking, VDI, RDP farms, etc. It's ridiculously inefficient.
> It's ridiculously inefficient.
You mean that simple tasks take many billable hours?
Hmmm ...
Re: Killed by Microsoft
#163Contrary 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…
Teams is unbelievably shit though. It’s like they don’t even care.
Slack is much better as a corporate chat app, but I’m not sure that’s necessarily good in the broader picture because I’m not sure you want to maximize chat engagement in a corporate setting. There are weird cultural effects to that, and paradoxically having a shittier app for that might get you the benefits of being able to chat with your coworkers and ask them questions without the weird social effects.
Re: Killed by Microsoft
#164I 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 g…
I'm not sure I'd say I miss any of these personally. But looking back with hindsight, I do see it as a shame that some of these products failed.
- I argue Kinect was 5+ years ahead of its time and marketed towards the worst possible market: gamers who want precise control of their content. motion tracking software with a built-in voice recognition sounds like something that could have been Alexa years before Amazon every bothered.
- Silverlight was in many ways a better version of Flash in everything except actual content delivery. But in the mid 2000's with limited hardware and networking, that was one of the most important steps.
- Mixer was a very ambitious attempt to try and create a competitor to video streaming that Twitch had long dominated by the time it launched. But it further seems to cement a harsh reality of modern social media; at a certain critical capacity, the only undoing of one has to be itself.
Re: Killed by Microsoft
#165Re: Killed by Microsoft
#166Contrary 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…
> Contrary to Google Don't know that I really agree with this. Google does have experimental services and tools that they've killed (RIP Google Reader), but they have always provided migration for their core services. Look at Messaging, for example. Gmail chat -> Hangouts -> Hangouts Chat(?) -> Allo(??) -> Hangouts (again?) -> Android Messages. The problem is not that they leave users completely stranded, the unendin…
Nope. I've been left stranded by Google over and over.
Talk to all the happy GSuite/Free users around now. Or people who developed Chrome Extensions prior to Manifest V3. Or who were banned from Google Fi, Youtube, or your app store of choice by an automated, broken algorithm. Or who developed Workspace Docs prior to mandatory security audits at price points which will break most independent developers. Or....
The key difference is Microsoft has exactly 2 or 3 things on the entire list where any users were left stranded. For Google, you're a statistic. If a change breaks 10,000 small businesses, Google looks at the impact on their bottom line, and goes ahead with the change.
Microsoft bends over backwards to NOT do this. AWS as well. It's not that it never happens, but if you've bet on your business on Google, you're basically guaranteed it will happen at one point or another.
Re: Killed by Microsoft
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Came to say the same. The vast majority of these were superseded by new products or their feature set was absorbed by other tooling. Back office was one of the worst examples. It became baked into Windows Server except Exchange. I’m no fan of MS, but they tend to err on the side of overextending support and backwards compatibility. I would have killed Works 10 years before they did. And some of these are just failure…
I liked Works. It ran on much less hardware than the Office Suite did. The much lower cost was a big deal too. The reduced feature set was never a big deal, it's not often that I need to put reverse video blink in a Word doc to be printed.
It was probably too much overhead to support Works. You’d still need an engineering team to support Works, and it wasn’t a big money maker. Much better to put some Office features behind a compiler/licensing flag and support one product with different “home” and “professional” SKUs.
But I kinda wonder the same thing about Apple’s Pages/Numbers/Keynote. I’m not sure the overhead to maintain those ultimately is worthwhile. It makes me think back on the old ClarisWorks or FileMaker setup where you ostensibly had an external company that made the product, but it was an Apple subsidiary. They could then offer the product for multiple OS’s. I’m not saying that business model was all that successful, but is there a place for an MS works in the time of Google docs?
Re: Killed by Microsoft
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Came to say the same. The vast majority of these were superseded by new products or their feature set was absorbed by other tooling. Back office was one of the worst examples. It became baked into Windows Server except Exchange. I’m no fan of MS, but they tend to err on the side of overextending support and backwards compatibility. I would have killed Works 10 years before they did. And some of these are just failure…
I liked Works. It ran on much less hardware than the Office Suite did. The much lower cost was a big deal too. The reduced feature set was never a big deal, it's not often that I need to put reverse video blink in a Word doc to be printed.
LibreOffice >> Works.
Just sayin'
Re: Killed by Microsoft
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Kinect => It's not dead ??? Is it alive? It very much has an immensely passionate community of students and hobbyists using it in ways well past its intended use (e.g. it's some of the cheapest mocap hardware you can buy). But I don't think you've been able to officially purchase one for 4+ years now. Hard to call that "alive" in a business sense. Honestly a real shame that Xbox hasn't pivoted it into some other tea…
There isn’t much money in selling to creators? And the niche the Kinect had with active gaming has been reliably filled by Meta/Facebook/oculus’s quest, it’s too bad Microsoft didn’t explore that more deeply.
Likely not, not in its current form. I wouldn't be surprised if in 2010 that Kinect was being sold at a significant loss (as is the usual trend in the games industry). They'd need to tweak the device quite a bit to be B2B, but given the success of game engines, asset packs, and other tools I don't think it's impossible.
Creators will absolutely pay a premium for such tech when the alternative goes for thousands of dollars (a quick google shows these devices selling on the order of 2000 to 7000+ USD). The SDK alone would generate much more value for such a product.
VR definitely killed any interest in the "core" gaming market, but I think the uses of motion tracking is a completely separate audience from VR anyway. Without some dedicated apparel, a VR kit can only track your eyes and hands. motion tracking gives you so much more data to work with, for potentially multiple subjects as well. People working with that data will easily pay themselves back with whatever they develop with it, which is why maybe a licensing deal (similar to Unity/Unreal Engine) may be a better way to monetize .
Re: Killed by Microsoft
#170Contrary 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…
I am really looking forward to the day Skype for Business finally dies forever. We introduced Teams a few years ago in our org. Back then it was lacking some of the features frequently used in Skype, so you'd have to keep both. Now, years later, about half of the org is still using Skype for no apparent reason. I don't particularly like Teams, primarily because of the excessive resource usage, but it is still better in every way.