A virtual graveyard? Yes, really. Killed by Microsoft describes itself as “a free and open-source list of discontinued Microsoft services, products, devices, and apps” that aims to be “a source of factual information about the history surrounding Microsoft's dead projects”. It's an excellent memorial. The project currently lists a staggering 70 scrapped products including Silverlight, the Adobe Flash competitor that once powered Netflix in the browser. What about Wunderlist? You can file that one in the embrace, extend and extinguish category that Microsoft is known so fondly for. However, you might be hard pressed to come up with legitimate complaints about its successor, Microsoft To-Do…
But wait, there’s more. Remember Windows Phone? For years under the Ballmer regime Microsoft became reactionary in the consumer space. They didn’t believe Apple had anything they needed to worry about with the iPhone and yet it forced them to kill Windows Mobile and start again with Windows Phone. They had a novel approach to what Apple and Google were already doing, but alas it was not meant to be.
Windows IoT was an interesting one. It was meant to run on SBCs like the Raspberry Pi, but it was extremely limited allowing users to run only a single UWP app. Not very flexible. Microsoft Band, Microsoft Zune, and Microsoft Kinect were also great products, but like Windows Phone they were reactionary. They tried to refine experiences that were already great elsewhere. This is a great postmortem and well worth the visit, especially if you’re a boomer and you have a 'Kinect-tion' to some of these old products. In fact, there are a few that died only recently.
Source: Killed by Microsoft
73 Comments - Add comment