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Comment by Suspect | Hacker News Reader

Zune. Surface RT. Kinect. Windows Phone. Band. Just naming some things that I've personally purchased and Microsoft no longer supports. They are no better than Google at continuing to support their products.

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Zune: introduced 2006; discontinued: 2012; support ended 2015 (9 years)

Surface RT: introduced: 2012; Discontinued: 2013; Windows support ends 2023 (11 years)

Kinect: introduced 2010; discontinued: 2015 for windows; 2017 for xbox; still supported (no date announced AFAICT)

Windows phone: introduced: 2010; last release 2015; windows phone os support ended 2017 (7 years)

Band: introduced 2014; discontinued 2016; still supported (no date announced AFAICT)

They gave up on band and RT pretty quickly... but they still supported those users.. a 2012 laptop will probably be dead by the time Windows RT support ends.

Just for comparison.. google is only 20 years old. Android is only 10 years old. Which products of Google's are you thinking of that failed and were supported for a decade? When Google Reader died, users got 3 1/2 months warning. Which Microsoft product got 3 1/2 months warning before ending support?

I understand why google has their support policy, and I'm not passing judgement here... but microsoft definitely supports their products longer, and that has a real cost to microsoft, and they deserve some credit for that.

Re. Kinect for Windows, manufacturing was switched from a separate Windows-only SKU to an adapter that could be shared across Xbox and Windows, however even that ended in 2018, giving Kinect 8 years of sales: https://www.polygon.com/2018/1/2/16842072/xbox-one-kinect-ad...

The last SDK release for Windows was SDK 2.0 in 2014, whose page now says:

> Manufacturing of the Kinect sensor and adapter has been discontinued, but the Kinect technology continues to live on in products like the HoloLens, Cortana voice assistant, the Windows Hello biometric facial ID system, and a context-aware user interface.

> Microsoft is working with Intel to provide an option for developers looking to transition from the Kinect for Windows platform. Microsoft will continue to provide support for the Kinect for Windows SDK via our online forums, premiere and paid technical support. As developers transition from Kinect hardware, Microsoft encourages developers to look into Intel's RealSense depth cameras.

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/kinect

For those who find this comment later via Google, there are libraries that support both Microsoft and Intel depth cameras: https://github.com/jing-interactive/Cinder-DepthSensor

As noted later in this comment thread, there now exists Project Kinect for Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/campaigns/kinect/ To me, this sounds like Microsoft using the Kinect and Azure IOT brands to provide their own SDK/hardware for Intel RealSense cameras, but it's unclear what the tech. is under the hood. It's certainly not compatible with older Kinect sensors and the old SDKs.

Windows 10 Mobile is supported until December 2019.

Groove music. Had like a couple months heads up before it was shuttered. There might be others, but that is the one I remember.

I don't agree that Microsoft is worse than Google, but if you want an example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin

"After only forty-eight days on the market, Microsoft discontinued the Kin line on June 30, 2010"

"In January 2011, Microsoft shut down the kin.com website, which controlled most of the earlier phones' features..."

The Kin actually had some pretty innovative for the time cloud features as well.

Just to put the Kin in context, they appeared to only have sold about 500 units [1] total. That's far below the typical absolute volume of users abandoned in most end-of-life scenarios. Microsoft's commitment to support is much longer than most similar tech lifecycles.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-only-sold-503-kin-p...

> Surface RT: introduced: 2012; Discontinued: 2013; Windows support ends 2023 (11 years)

"Support" here doesn't mean much if there are no new features, nobody driving an ecosystem making applications.

It's like the slow death of Blackberry 10 and the Palm Pre.

Compared to Google Reader, I very, very strongly prefer slow deaths.

Google reader was a web application. Every time you accessed it, Google was paying for it. You already paid for your Windows RT device.

And they are not taking your Surface RT either. You can keep using it for ever, in the same state as it was when you purchased it, just don't expect new features.

How long until you are unable to update your digital certificates? Or the certificates used to sign the apps you run are no longer valid and the apps cease to function?

>Surface RT: introduced: 2012; Discontinued: 2013; Windows support ends 2023 (11 years)

Disingenuous. 1 Year, not 11. It may be receiving some critical security patching but the RT is absolutely an unsupported, forgotten, isolated and largely unusable piece of hardware, and has been for several years now.

Support != continued development. It means they support the last existing iteration of the software on the device, providing only security updates and assistance with features existing in that last version of the software.

When you buy a product like a Windows RT device, you don't just expect it to be supported, you expect it to be part of a growing ecosystem of products and services. That is not what happened with Windows RT. The fact it was dropped so quickly shows it was very half-baked, despite how long it may be supported.

Yup, mostly because unlike other similar devices, the RT was limited to only what was available within the store, and within that only those items specifically targeting the RT.

It's not even as good a situation as you have with things like the google play or apple stores, as the architecture restricted the ecosystem.

Example: There are pretty much no browser options on Surface RT other than an obsoleted IE. Certainly no Chrome or Firefox. Even 'supported for five minutes' cheapie android tablets are better than that, and this thing was shipped by Microsoft?

UWP apps can be marked as "RT Compatible" and they should also run. You won't get any Xbox Games, but you'll be able to get... checks microsoft store ...Candy Crush looks like the best thing on there.

That support means just security updates. I have bought a Lumia 820 and then Lumia 950 and the "real" updates stopped happening after only 1.5 to 2 years. Lumia 820 did not get Windows 10 update (although officially promised by Microsoft).

Is Lumia 950 still supported? On the paper, yes. But there are no new features, only security updates. When we bought Microsoft ecosystem hardware, software-wise they had a long way to go until they caught up with Android and iOS, but we saw the potential, they were releasing new features to catch up with the rest of the competition. When updates stopped after just 1.5 years, we ended up with half baked products.

I am not even mentioning the investment I did as a developer to develop Windows Mobile apps.

Sorry but I am not giving any credits to Microsoft. They tried to make money on short term, and when they couldn't, they abandoned users.

I can give credits to the Microsoft engineers though, they created a great operating system and a great SDK which works on all screen sizes, with different hardware and with any input type. And you can develop an application using both native technologies or the first class citizen web technologies.

So your problem is that the product, as you purchased, works just as well as the day you bought it, and continues to get security updates? You seem to be upset about things that it was not and will never be, and not anything that it was that it no longer is.

My reply was simply an answer to the claim that Microsoft's approach deserves credits when compared to Google's support to their products. And I explained why the situation with Microsoft products are similar, not better, compared to Google's support approach.

And from law point of view, Microsoft of course did not break any laws by not updating the phones. But when announcing Windows 10 Mobile phones, emphasising that the phones now have the same operating system as desktop counterparts and hence they will get the same updates, and not delivering this feature, is worth to be upset about.

For a company that has been there for about 40 years, I would say that this list is quite small compared to Google. Google deprecate product way faster, look at the lineup of communication/chat products in the last decade which is bigger than the list you posted.

Zune, Band and Surface RT are still functional with running back-end infrastructure (except for 1st party music purchases on Zune).

Kinect is not dead, it still works on xbox/windows and they released a new enterprise offering just this past month.

That's about it, though. All companies discontinue products, but Microsoft keeps them around for a lot longer than most.

The Surface RT is probably making a comeback, as several Windows ARM tablets were just released. It was just early to market.

Nah they can do full windows on arm now, no need to go the hobbled route

> Surface RT

Let's not forget the original Surface.

Does anyone support financially unsuccessful products? I think Google gets a bad rap because a) it can kill products with large amounts of users that still aren't valuable enough to the bottom line or company strategy, and b) it can't seem to focus behind one way to solve a problem. Whereas we don't knock hardware companies as much, because the thing has a finite lifespan and more or less continues to work for its useful life.

Windows RT — were there any users to miss it? I loved Windows Phone, but I was surprised Microsoft didn't kill it sooner.

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