Microsoft is an old company (at least in technical terms) – and a very successful one at that, but not every product it makes is a success.
There is a Games for Windows Live for every Windows 7. Every Microsoft Office has a Clippy.
To help people reminisce and relive Microsoft products of yesteryear, a group of developers and technology enthusiasts have created an open source site called Microsoft graveyard.
If that rings a bell, it’s probably because you may have come across it Killed by Googlea similar website created by Cody Ogden, another developer and technology enthusiast, but for outdated and discontinued Google products. Ogden created an analogous website for Microsoft products called Killed by Microsoftand that was a major inspiration for the creation of the Microsoft Graveyard.
Welcome to the (unofficial) Microsoft graveyard
On Microsoft Graveyard, you can view the various products, services, apps, and other creations that Microsoft has launched and ultimately dropped – both software and hardware.
There’s plenty to think about, as many people who have used computer or mobile products for part of their lives have probably come across at least a few of them. I’m sure, and there’s also a lot to learn about Microsoft’s many innovation attempts over the years (Microsoft Graveyard’s contributions are in chronological order).
The Unofficial Archive of Discontinued Microsoft Products was created by Victor Frye and a community of Microsoft enthusiasts and launched last week. The group calls the website “a passion project built because we lovingly used many of these products before their untimely deaths.” You can read about products like MSN Messenger, Kinect and many more. MSN Messenger (also known as Live Messenger) was a cross-platform instant messaging (IM) program used by many children growing up in the early stages of the Internet as we know it today, and Kinect was a motion-sensitive game controller that was killed off last year.
Go down memory lane yourself and read about things like Windows Phone, Zune, the recently ‘deceased’ Cortana, Clippy and much more. Each entry lists the name of the product, which links to a page where you can find more details about the product (sometimes a Wikipedia page). This was followed by the lifespan of the product and a paragraph description of the product.
Go see it for yourself and maybe even join in
When you visit the website, you may notice that the first handful of entries are dated in the future and that the icons are coffins instead of gravestones. That’s to indicate the Microsoft products that will join the rest of the discontinued “dead” products on the list in the near future. This includes products like Windows 10 (which continues to see minor tweaks and updates), the Xbox 360 Store, and others.
If you’re intrigued, I recommend checking out Microsoft Graveyard for yourself. Because it is an open source project on GitHub, you can actually participate in compiling, contributing to and maintaining the website. You can also follow the ongoing development and updates of the project on Wires.