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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

Picking random products from the list:

- Microsoft Chart: now just a feature of Excel - Microsoft Works: seems like you can just replace it with MS Office? - Windows Photo Viewer: virtually identical to "Photos" on Windows 10, apart from the new UI framework. - Microsoft Cobol: superseded by Visual Studio which apparently also supports Cobol? - Microsoft Frontpage: apparently replaced by Microsoft Expression Web, which is itself discontinued - Microsoft Encarta: I have good memories, but in the age of Wikipedia probably not very profitable - Microsoft DVD Maker: Kind of sad, but I don't remember the last time I burned a Video DVD

I guess this helps explain why nobody really feels like Microsoft is deprecating a lot of products. Most things on this list are either replaced by something better, not relevant anymore or never really found a market.

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A few things:

Windows Photo Viewer: Indeed, Microsoft has had several iterations of image viewers over the years. They all have nuances and pros/cons. But in the end, not everyone was happy about the "upgrades." WPV was deprecated and articles like this showed up: https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-get-windows-photo-viewer-...

Works: Works was a free (with new PCs) entry-level office suite. MS Office is of course not free. They are completely separate product lines that happen to share some (but not all) file formats.

Cobol: I believe Visual Studio only supported Cobol starting in 2015. That's a ~20 year absence from the original.

The list shows deprecated products that didn't have a specific drop-in, straightforward upgrade path for the end-user.

MS Office the desktop software isn't free, but you can use the online versions for free[1]. Considering the Works was never quite at feature parity with Word anyway, the gimped down version of Office Online is a decent alternative.

You also have the benefit of not having inconsistencies in file formats, which was always frustrating when working with Works and trying to edit files from Office.

[1] https://products.office.com/en-us/free-office-online-for-the...

Works was actually a completely separate codebase from an acquisition, and, as a result, many common features actually worked differently from Microsoft Office. This was problematic as it made upgrading from Works to Office difficult as many people who used Works were used to Works and found Office unfamiliar. I have been told by more than one person that they preferred Works to Office over the years.

Microsoft's issue is a little different in that they rarely retire a concept but frequently cycle through implementations. My experience over the years has been less of a Google style "there's no more Reader, where do I go now?" and more "oh, now I have to learn a new but extremely similar app that does the same thing under a different name and set of terms."

See Skype -> Lync -> Skype -> Teams for example

You mean MS Comic Chat -> MSN -> MSN Messenger -> Windows Live Messenger -> Lync / Skype -> Teams

I miss MSN so much. It was simple, worked with Pidgin, now I don't even know what new IM services even work with Pidgin in 2019.

In a perfect world I shoulda been able to use Slack, Discord etc on Pidgin still.

There is a universal law which dictates that messaging clients must get worse.

There is no shipping messaging client that is a material improvement over what was available in 2000.

I think you can use those in Pidgin?

https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/ThirdPartyPlugins

Wow! I was never aware of those plugins!

Can I use them on Android?

wow just realized pidgin seems instagram-capable https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-instagram

It is very interesting that concepts like custom emoticons, group voice chat, group chat adminstration, message formatting, all existed in MSN, and all but disappeared from publicly-popular products until Slack, and Discord came up.

Skype, when WLM was shut down, was _very_ primitive in its communication options, let alone moderation tools. Sure, things like TeamSpeak and whatnot existed for organized voice chat, but that's not something my mother would be able to use. Skype didn't even have group voice calls back then, let alone video. Emoticons are still limited to the standard ones (or nowadays, seasonal sponsored emoticons), group chat moderation is limited to text commands with no accompanying visual interface (it is not even possible to show who is a group's moderator or owner). Heck, Discord and alike still don't even allow multi-window messaging!

Not to mention the client itself never lasted more than a couple years without a full interface redesign.

Of course, in an ideal world I'd love for some sort of standard interface that allowed me to locally confederate all my services, but sadly Slack and Discord both have TOS rules that require the use of _their_ client, even though their bot APIs are basically feature-complete.

> Existed, died, resurrected

There are quite a few examples of this, both industry wide and specifically from MS. Sometimes it is due to the first implementation being bad, sometimes it is that some part of the tech simply isn't quite ready (or isn't yet quite cheap enough for mass adoption), sometimes it is solving a problem that at the time is very niche but later becomes a more common need.

Think tablets. Anyone else remember MS's big "pen computing" push with tablet & hybrid style PCs that were too heavy, ran too warm, and didn't have batteries that lasted long enough? Or in a similar vain, more general and arguably more successful in their time, PDAs which died out but our phones basically now fill the same role.

Isn't Lync based on Office Communicator?

Yeah, the “enterprise” product lineage is more Live Communicator -> Office Communicator -> Lync -> Skype for Business (kinda direct link to, even though it’s SaaS only) -> Teams

From what I hear the Lead Architect of Teams used to work on Lync. So I can easily agree that Teams is a child of Lync. Some things are improved though I hear a lot of people having issues with Teams sadly.

Teams is supposed to be the replacement. It's kind of trash as an instant messenger client, for entirely interface-related reasons - they built it in Electron, so it is difficult to pop out separate windows for individual chats, so one is stuck with tabbed soup.

Although it's probably the best voip and video conferencing software they have put out.

The choice to rebrand Lync as Skype for Business after the Skype aquisition has caused endless confusion.

Skype and Skype for Business are almost completely unrelated, and barely interoperate.

> "there's no more Reader, where do I go now?"

This is to me a reminder that Google is more willing to push through newish markets (and sometimes destroy the emerging players as a side effect).

FrontPage getting buried doesn't hit hard because there was already dozen of other more interesting editors, and Frontpage never was the front runner nor did Microsoft really push for it to be the best.

Same for Skype, if tomorrow it was to be sunsetted, it wouldn't be without pain and it will piss a ton of people that use it daily, but that pain would be gone in 2 weeks once they get used to other messaging platforms.

In contrast people are still pissed at Google for many of their buried products that basically took down their market with them, or never get a better replacement.

There's also a lot of really weird niche products in the business software list, like the Microsoft Stat Pack (literally just some government data on a CD-ROM), or Dynamics RMS Headquarters (a set of tools for managing a retail business).

Microsoft Works was always an odd duck -- a cut-down relative of Office (except not actually Office) for home users. Merging this into Office was a sensible decision that should have happened many years ago, TBH.

Actually some things were better in Works, I especially remember being able to embed parts of a spreadsheet seemlessly into a text processor document and be able to update it one place. That was amazing back in 1995.

And importantly, Microsoft Works came bundled for free with new PCs. MS Office was not.

Wasn't it WordPad that shipped free, and Works or Word that were upsells?

WordPad was included with Windows.

Works was included with computers. You could also buy it separately, but a lot of users got it with their computer.

Works sold for $30, but was often bundled by OEMs.

Not when you understand the economics/operation of 1980s desktop software.

Multitasking OSes? Nope - not in the early-mid 1980s.

You want to use another app? Save your work, quit your current app and launch the new app.

Cooperative multitasking eventually arrived, but if you didn't have enough RAM, it would be painful to switch amongst multiple apps.

Then there's the cost of the apps. You want a word processor? ~$250. Spreadsheet? Another ~$250. Presentation app? guess what? Another ~$250.

Or you can buy one of these new-fangled integrated apps that include word processor, spreadsheet, graphics, database and some other stuff. These integrated apps were jack-of-all-trades going for the 80% functionality that people needed. All for the price of one of the dedicated apps.

AppleWorks, MS Works, Ashton-Tate Framework filled a need at the low end.

There were always going to be users who didn't want/need the full functionality of a typical dedicated word processor/spreadsheet or didn't want to pay for features they didn't need/use.

Once Excel was fleshed out and MS bought Powerpoint, the Office suite of apps was born, priced at less than the total cost of the 3 individual apps.

The standalone desktop apps were living on borrowed time.

FWIW, AmigaOS had full preemptive multitask in 1985.

Frontpage => VS Code

What? FP let you do WYSIWYG html and then generated horrendous markup. VS Code is first and foremost a text editor.

More accurately Web Matrix => VS Code

Text editor + IDE

Projects evolve, Frontpage was a dead road. It evolved somewhat, but it finally came together with VS Code.

What is more popular now to develop web projects than VS Code?

Frontpage > Office SharePoint Designer > SharePoint Designer 2013 (now EOL)

Also there was Microsoft Expression Web, also EOL.

I’m remembering a deal Microsoft made with Adobe to stop making Microsoft Expression products in exchange for more platform support, or something. I forget the details.

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