Killed by Microsoft

A tribute and log of beloved products and services killed by Microsoft.

Contribute

To add a product, gather the following information:

• Name of Product (name) - the name of the product
• Launch Date (dateOpen) - it should be the date of first release or at least the "beta" or when it is made avaialbe to the customer, do not confuse with the product's announcement
• Discontinued Date (dateClose) - it should be the date when the product is "no longer available for purchase" or, for web-based services, when the service stops its normal functioning. However, if it is not clear when an application was discontinued, you can use the date of the latest significant release (i.e., a release adding new features). This case is typical for old desktop applications.
• Description (description) - a bried description of the product
• Link (link) - Relevant link to the source
• Links (links) - other relevant links to the source, since all the information may not be available at the same link. Actually this field is not rendered
• Type (type) - the type of product (see below)
• Slug (slug) - (optional), specify a custom slug (an identifier SEO friendly in the form "product-name"). Used only for testing

Description

The description should be a single sentence describing the product. It should begin with the products name. For example, "Google Reader was an RSS/Atom feed aggregator." It will be attached to a generated sentence like "Killed about 5 years ago, Google Reader was an RSS/Atom feed aggregator."

Please be respectful, only use past tense.

Link

Link should be a resource that mentions the discontinuation date and talks about the product. Wikipedia is perfect.

Type

The type of product must be either:

• app: software installable on an OS (i.e. Office) or a specific functionality of an app (i.e. a plugin, such as Clippy for Office)
• service: web-based services (i.e. TechNet) or mixture of hardware and/or software which concur to provide value to the user
• os: operating systems (i.e. Windows Mobile)
• hardware: a physical object or a family (i.e. Lumia)

If you are not familiar with or do not want to use git, submit a new issue requesting the change. If you are already familiar with git, follow these steps:

1. If you haven't already, start by forking this repository.
2. Create a new branch in your fork. Name it using the product you want to add
3. Switch to that branch (should happen automatically if you've just created it) and open the graveyard.json file
4. Use the information gathered above to add a JSON entry in the following format (note the alphabetical order of keys):

  {
    "dateClose": "YYYY-MM-DD",
    "dateOpen": "YYYY-MM-DD",
    "description": "[Product Name] was a single sentence overview of the product or service.",
    "link": "https://any.link-to-a.source/will/work-and-wikipedia-is-cool",
    "links": [
      "https://any.link-to-a.source/will/work-and-wikipedia-is-cool"
    ],
    "name": "[Product Name]",
    "type": "app|service|os|hardware"
  }

5. Finally, create a Pull Request (PR) using the newly created branch (Important: DON'T use the master branch for the PR). Submit it with the necessary explanations.

For code contributions outside of graveyard.json, check out the Contributing Guide.

Install and build

Install Node v14.x.x (😢):

yarn install
node bin/graveyard
yarn dev

The script in bin/graveyard.js updates graveyard.json and copy it in proper directory. Jest is used to test the project and in particular to test the format of graveyard.json. To run it type:

yarn jest

Then, to create the production version:

yarn build

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Cody Odgen, author and designer of the graveyard for the products killed by Google, that provides the skeleton for Killed by Microsoft.

Notes

The practice Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish seems to be a mantra for Microsoft, and many companies fell under it. However, I would collect only extinguished products (digital or physical) on this page and not companies. So, for example, Solair, a provider of knowledge and consulting in the IoT field, is excluded.