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eindiran

For comparison, the total killed products here: 343, since 1975. That's about 7.8 per year.

Killed Google products: 194, since 1996 [0]. That's about 8.4 per year.

So all-in-all, Google isn't doing that much worse.

[0] https://killedbygoogle.com/

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It's not the same because Google's products are all (or at least mostly?) services, whereas many of the Microsoft products listed are simple releases with no continuing support required for them to still work (e.g. 3D Movie Maker).

"Killed" (can't use it anymore), vs. "Discontinued" (might stop working on new operating systems at some point in the future).

True, but Microsoft has plenty of these too. Look at the specific list of retired Microsoft websites and services. There's a lot of them (69 to be exact):

https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-micros...

I don't disagree. Just seemed a bit unfair to lump Microsoft's whole discontinued list in with Google's killed list.

This is actually a great point, and one thing that has me skeptical of Stadia and other upcoming game-streaming services.

People who never got rid of their NES can still play their games. If it breaks, they could buy another one, or maybe even try to fix it themselves.

Once a service shuts down, you don't really have anything to keep or to revisit. If there was a Stadia-only game in the future, could you somehow get a copy and run it on local hardware to keep playing if Stadia shut down? Could you do it easily.

Super Mario Bros, Classic Tetris, etc. they still have active communities of speed-runners, tournaments, etc. It's kind of weird that something with the level of cultural impact a videogame can have could all of a sudden disappear because it doesn't exist anywhere but in a centralized space outside the control of the people who experienced it.

Sometimes I feel like removing ownership from the consumer is the goal of moving everything into a subscription service.

The goal is to extract more revenue from the consumer, losing ownership is largely a byproduct of that.

It is, because you can't get a continuous stream of payment with ownership.

Services have been profitable partially because it eliminates volatility in the amount of demand.

Software developers have discovered that people are bad at measuring value and they are bad at delivering additional value over time. Subscriptions always cost more and force a decision every year.

I play Super Mario brothers on my old Nintendo every couple of years. No revenue has been realized since 1986 or whatever. Just a payment for the NES and game.

Today, you can get unlimited access to virtually all music made in the last century or every show made by Disney ever for less than a subscription to some goofy text editor.

And even better they can grab a pile of FOSS software, hide it behind their paywalls and don't give a neither a dime, not code back.

See "Games as a service is fraud":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw

If you have an hour, I'd highly recommend giving this a watch. It is really sad to see any form of media die forever at the whim of a corporation. Games are especially prone to this unfortunately

You don't even need to imagine it!

Satellaview [1] was a "game streaming" service for SNES games in Japan way back when. Sure, it was more like the "game passes" of today, in that you paid a subscription to be able to access games for limited time.

Back then the games were actually sent and stored to the user's device, and played from there, with additional content in the form of high-quality music and audio streamed if you played in the correct times of day.

Now, since the games themselves have been backed-up by conscious individuals, the streamed data was inaccessible, which renders a bunch of the games practically unplayable since the company shut the service down.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellaview#SoundLink

Some of the products in that list also got superseded by better tools with different names.

Not only that, but most of Microsoft's discontinued products were replaced by arguably better alternative products.

Windows 95 -> 98 -> XP -> ...

Microsoft Works -> Office

COBOL -> ... -> Visual Studio

Unlike Google, where, for example, Reader is gone and they don't have any alternatives.

Hey Google+ was a great replacement for Reader. And social media hermeticism was a great replacement for Google+.

Microsoft Windows is not on the list because it had direct descendent upgrades. 95 to 98 to XP etc provided a smooth upgrade experience for the end-user.

Works and Office were completely different product lines, and Works was free for the vast majority of its users, while Office was obviously not. It's not apples to apples.

COBOL was not in Visual Studio for ~20 years. Someone in 1996 couldn't have just fired up Visual Studio for Cobol after it was deprecated back then.

The top product on the killed by Google list is AngularJS, which was replaced by... Angular.

Not saying its like that with all the products on there, but one would have to make two entirely new lists to make a fair comparison.

Yea, but going through the list, a lot of the products are vain rebrands. Some of which still exist in one form or another. Some haven't exactly died either, they were just absorbed into "bigger" products.

Though, RT being put out to pasture.... I had to develop an app for that arbitrary lockout piece of trash. Whoever thought of RT and whoever approved it, deserves a life-long raging case of crabs and... like... a monthly visit of dysentery.

The list specifically lists products that didn't have a specific drop-in upgrade path. So the rebrands are different products that users had to make a decision about purchasing their successor (if there was one) or go with a competitor.

At least some of these products had free replacements, or replacements that were bundled with future versions of windows. Microsoft Internet Explorer is on the list, and I'm pretty sure its replacement (Edge) costs nothing.

That's an interesting statistic, but it's difficult to compare the two apples-to-apples. Most of Microsoft's discontinued products cost actual money to purchase. Most of the Google discontinued products were free.

In addition, many of the Google products listed are essentially acqui-hires. Products with limited user base. Microsoft has very few of those. So if you wanted to really do a full analysis, those would be some things to examine. It would be really interesting to see.

You’re painting this in a very biased light. When MS discontinued Software X people who paid for it could maybe even use it to this day. Some of that software was also a one time release with no maintenance to speak of. And most other pieces of software just had the functionality rolled into a bigger suite (with or without a gap in between) because it made sense.

Comparing this to killing a service is not a fair way to put it. The fact that they were acqui-killings as a justification or consolation is a bit of a stretch. The difference between killing a service and abandoning (discontinuing) a product is not just one of semantics, it’s huge.

I disagree with your premise, but even then... Microsoft has discontinued lots of online services too! Almost 70:

https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-micros...

Big companies cancel things. Priorities change, opportunities shift. It happens.

You're correct, they did discontinue/killed a lot of stuff. I just noticed you insist on painting them in a much worse light throughout the discussion compared to how you paint Google. And you don't consider that MS is also exactly twice the age of Google (22 extra years to discontinue/kill products and services).

I know whoever brought Google in the discussion was engaging in a bit of whataboutism but I think we can agree that while MS has some big failures (Windows Phone/Mobile sized), they are not standing out among other big names in the industry and are nowhere near as egregious with the practice as Google.

I feel as if Microsoft has released overall far more products than Google, though I don't have a resource on hand to substantiate that claim. I think the statistic is only valuable if it's killed-per-released product.

Many of the Microsoft products continued working after support ended, or were replaced by something else with the same functionality.

Google's products stop working completely, and are rarely superseded. They just go away.

Might be worth comparing the ratio of killed products vs. supported products as well, instead of just the absolute number for the number of killed products. I dont have any data to back up this assertion, but i have a feeling that this ratio would differ very significantly between Google and MSFT.

We should compare the time between officially discountinued and no longer usable. For Google products it's the same date but I did and do use MS products long after they are killed off*

* Image Composer, MS Money, Media Center, Movie Maker, WinDIff, Web Matrix, Silverlight, the list goes on...

You should normalize this by the company size. Larger company is expected to discontinue more products.

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