If this is to be a simple listout of products and services that were superseded or discontinued because it made no sense to continue them (as opposed to breaking promises or replacing them with inferior counterparts), then on the MS side we have:
Active Desktop, Briefcase, CardSpace, Meeting Space, NetMeeting, Windows Sidebar, Desktop Gadgets and Windows SideShow (which displayed gadgets in a secondary screen on laptop lids etc., kinda cool at the time but I never saw an implementation in the wild), Office Assistant (Clippy in the File Explorer), Encarta and the rest of the edutainment product line (which were actually great and often used as a selling point for PCs at the time), XP themes, HTML thumbnails, the Comic Chat IRC client (my first gateway to social interaction on the internet), the SideWinder game controllers for PC (including the Dual Strike [0] which was way ahead of its time), MSN/Live Messenger, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Visual Basic, FoxPro and many others... :)
One question: After being exposed to Comic Chat as your first chat client, do you now visualize everyone you chat with and your online environment as if they were drawn by Jim Woodring?
I'm sure the end of Visual Basic (before the .NET impostor) was as much of a big if not bigger deal for many people as HyperCard. :p
The discontinuation of many of those things personally affected or disappointed me at the time. I distinctly remember mourning some of them:
- Losing people who only ever used Comic Chat and didn't make the migration to other services.
- The end of offline Encarta at a time when my internet wasn't very cheap, fast or reliable.
- Owning some great PC joysticks but not being able to utilize their full haptic features with newer APIs, before the joysticks themselves went out of production, when Microsoft's console division cannibalized their PC gaming division.
- A cool vector graphics editor [0] that worked better for me than Adobe or Corel getting discontinued after 2 versions.
The point of this whole thread is developer confidence, and I have felt betrayed and abandoned by Microsoft many times but I have yet to experience that during my time on Apple platforms.
Apple's current APIs are impressive and very forward-looking, and the only times I felt that optimistic about Microsoft was just before they broke their promises.
Cool link by the way, I hadn't known of Jim Woodring before today!
Both HyperCard and VB were really great for personal computing because they made it relatively easy for people to start making their own tools.
I made my first game with HyperCard, sadly lost to time unless the floppy is still sitting in some middle-school computing lab's storage room and hasn't degraded beyond readability.
Even recently I had a hobby project where VB 1.0 for DOS was a quick and easy way to hack together a GUI.
I'm saddened by the fact that "modern" desktops are increasingly becoming consumption-only devices. Personal computing is near death and no one seems to care much.
I do a lot of freelance working with small companies / non-profits. The people there typically need what are programmatically simple tasks done: converting fields of a CSV to some other format, adjusting the appearance of only certain Excel sheets in a folder of files, etc. But they are not what today we call "programmers," and there are no good tools anymore for them to easily build things that accomplish these theoretically simple tasks.
What's worse, it's even more difficult for me to build them a solution. If these systems came with something as powerful as Hypercard was on Macs in the early 90s, I could make them something they could maintain themselves, and it would have a GUI and everything. Today I have to go through an enormous build process and all kinds of hoops just to wrap simple tasks in a usable UI. This is NOT personal computing!
I think one part of the issue is that an entire generation or two of personal computing users has now grown up with only this "consumer" mentality and they have no idea what they're missing, what was abandoned more or less in the 90s. It's a very frustrating and sad state of affairs — but also one primed for a change.
> I'm saddened by the fact that "modern" desktops are increasingly becoming consumption-only devices.
I have been lamenting the loss of the ability to code as soon as you switched on a computer, ever since I moved from a Commodore 64 to an IBM PC clone. :)
You can’t even use $500+ devices as a simple calculator without an “app.”
We need more stuff like Swift Playgrounds, preinstalled on operating systems, but would people care?
The first thing almost everyone wants to do is open a browser and log on Facebook etc.
Maybe those people are the majority of the market, but that market will be served by tablets, phones and desktop web kiosks. The market for actual personal computers still exists, it's just being ignored by everyone because it is relatively small, like it was before the web made computers interesting to the current majority user base.
Active Desktop, Briefcase, CardSpace, Meeting Space, NetMeeting, Windows Sidebar, Desktop Gadgets and Windows SideShow (which displayed gadgets in a secondary screen on laptop lids etc., kinda cool at the time but I never saw an implementation in the wild), Office Assistant (Clippy in the File Explorer), Encarta and the rest of the edutainment product line (which were actually great and often used as a selling point for PCs at the time), XP themes, HTML thumbnails, the Comic Chat IRC client (my first gateway to social interaction on the internet), the SideWinder game controllers for PC (including the Dual Strike [0] which was way ahead of its time), MSN/Live Messenger, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Visual Basic, FoxPro and many others... :)
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShp4F4cUDE