Hacker News Reader

Comment by fixermark | Hacker News Reader

I was going to make a comment about how Google's approach to service deprecation contrasts with Microsoft's, but then I spot-checked my assumptions and realized that MS has discontinued over 50% of the Office ecosystem of apps over the years.

So I think I need to instead ask a question: Is Google's deprecation strategy actually unusual for a company with a wide ecosystem of offerings?

View on HN

Disagree about the MS point a bit.

Yes, nominally, MS has killed some programs in the Office Suite, but the core products of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook are still there. Even the weird, obscure products like Publisher and Access are still around.

So maybe they killed Clippy, but that guy

Google has killed some of its offerings, but the core products of search, ads, drive, and mail are still there.

(... Inbox being only a UI on top of the mailbox and not the mailbox itself, not unlike Microsoft Schedule+ went away but the underlying Outlook functionality remained).

Desktop software is different from cloud services. If I have a Windows XP and Office 2003 disc then I can still run Frontpage if I so wish (ideally in a VM not connected to the network). There is no way that I can run Google Notebook anymore (shut down in 2012).

Groove Music Pass and Microsoft Band stand out as good parallels, too. As does Windows 10 Mobile. The Microsoft Health service that went with Band & Mobile is shutting down soon. And they announced today that they'll no longer sell books in the Microsoft Store app.

It's getting hard to trust both companies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com