I worked on this as a side project during my summer internship at Siftery. For building the site, I used a bootstrap grid for front-end structure and node.js to help with filtering and inserting the data.
Please join in by contributing a funny story or eulogy for one of the featured products.
I can't provide a funny story or eulogy, but have a scary one... "Microsoft Lync" [item 10 on the list right now] is not dead, it's aaaalllliiiiivvveeeee...
Those of us who work in the nightmare planes, where Microsoft products are mandated, once hoped that Microsoft's "Skype for Business" would bring us a bit of non-corporate real-world better-because-it-had-to-compete-on-its-own-merits product to save us from the eternal pain of Lync.
But no, it turned out that "Skype for Business" REALLY IS just Lync, with only two changes. 1) rebranding 2) somehow, despite changing almost nothing, they managed to break copy-and-paste, it doesn't work reliably any more
It's a zombie horror story!
The screen sharing also seems to take a while to sync up. Worse, it silently stops updating somewhere in the call. Lync seems to have the worst real world performance of any screen sharing / conferencing app I've used.
- For a long time, the status of other users it showed was completely off. Like showing people online when they weren't. Also, sending messages sometimes mysteriously failed.
- Cannot copy conversation as text (formatting is messed up). Cannot save it as text without removing smileys.
- Cannot paste text verbatim into conversation without making silly smileys everywhere.
- There is a (relatively small) limit on how much text you could paste in.
- Couldn't transfer certain files (like .js or .exe).
Many of these things make sense for things like unmoderated chat, but I need to work, and sometimes exchange larger amounts of text and binary data.
The only reason it can compete is because of Microsofts package deals and the anticompetitive integration with the rest of their ecosystem.
Windows Lync>Skype for Business is literally a registry key you roll out that changes the name and some minor interface chrome.
But paste without formatting works, which is something like Shift+Ctrl+V.
Stupid, but just about usable if desperate.
Also, the list makes me realize a problem with putting everything "in the cloud": with a traditional desktop application, if the vendor goes belly up or just doesn't feel like working on it any more, at least you can keep using the version you already have. If the whole thing runs on the web, and the vendor decides to pull the on those servers, it's just gone.
Blizzard has a good track record of supporting old games, and as a studio I think they'll be around for a long time, but they won't be forever.
I recently read that Shadow of War is similarly always-online single player. And I have much less faith in Warner Brothers Games to keep that running than I do in Blizzard.
One nitpick: isn’t it inefficient to generate a unique banner image for every dead product? Each one is largely the same, except for the product logo being in the center. Would help to remove these banners or compress them so pages load faster on mobile.
As for the banner, I will definitely make this improvement in the future. Thanks for the suggestion!
Putting alternatives there is quite good.
> Did you know _____ ? Please share a eulogy or funny story.
lol.
Apps are not listed? Like Sparrow is missing - the email client killed by Google.
Looks great by the way!! Really interesting to peruse.
Napster
Alta Vista
WinMX