Microsoft has killed more products than Google.
A comparison shows most products that should be dead are on that list.
G, on the other hand, has products actively used and loved by users.
This Domains shutdown definitely qualifies for the short list though, and is the most mystifying shutdown of theirs in like a decade. It was a paid service with clear strategic importance and clearly a ton of happy customers.
I have stopped using any new Google product, and am slowly phasing out my reliance on their other products.
specifically, how are those audio files bought from the M$ mu$ic store when they pulled the plug on the licensing server for their DRM?
your claim of still running on modern Windows would be impressive if it is actually true, but saying to use a completely different OS is not something the vast majority of people not typically reading HN are going to do.
Windows and Microsoft are the legendary backwards compatibility outlier in the software industry where essentially everyone else moves fast and breaks shit.
Incidentally, I still have not come across a suitable replacement for Winamp all these years later. They all have crappy UIs or bring features that I do not want and get in my way.
With a complete RCE like that though, I would definitely not advise playing music downloaded from peer-to-peer networks. While I'm not familiar with the exact requirements to exploit the vulnerability, I would err on the side of caution and assume that music files can be crafted that contain malicious metadata which can achieve similar results without actually being connected to the streaming service.
It's fixed in Winamp v5.52 and above, and the version I use is v5.531 so I'm not affected as it turns out.
I'm sure there are other bugs that I'm affected by, but again: Not really concerned about it.
Windows XP incorporated more user-centric elements from 9x, which culminated with ME, into NT.
Windows 8 incorporated more mobile-centric elements from CE into NT.
Windows is still rock solid at running programs from almost 30 years ago.
Google software can only DREAM of doing that. Microsoft was doing software while Google people were still even not planned to be born.
If we consider the start year to be 1981, the year MS-DOS 1 came out, that is twenty years of official, commercial support, if we count 7.1 and 8 that's twenty five years.
If you need software you can count on to still be there a few decades down the line, if not more de facto, count on Microsoft to deliver.