Microsoft Graveyard: last honor for dead Microsoft products
You may have heard of Google Graveyard. A website dedicated to all the products and services that Google terminated over the years. Google Podcasts is one of the latest products in the graveyard. Microsoft Graveyard is the Microsoft pendant to Google Graveyard.
The Microsoft Graveyard features a long list of Microsoft products and services that the company shut down in its long history. Some of the listed products are on their last leg, but not dead yet.
Note: there is also Killed by Microsoft, which offers similar information.
The products are sorted chronologically on the Microsoft Graveyard. The very first product listed is Microsoft Bob. The project's aim was to provide a user-friendlier interface for Microsoft's operating systems, which were Windows 95 and NT at the time. Bob was designed for novice computer users. It featured cartoon characters and rooms that users could visit.
Bob did not gain wide acceptance with users and Microsoft canceled the project less than one year after its release in 1995.
The first years are dominated by Microsoft operating systems. The list of operating systems begins with Windows 1.0, which Microsoft kept alive until 2001.
Popular operating systems, such as MS-DOS, Windows 98, Windows XP and Windows 7 are found on the list. Obviously, there are also less popular versions of Windows on the list. There is Windows Millennium Edition and Windows 8, for instance, which were not exactly fan favorites.
The newest operating system on the list is Windows 10, which Microsoft plans to retire in October 2025 officially for home users. Still, even home users may extend support by at least three years through the Windows 10 Extended Security Updates program.
The majority of products and services are not operating systems. The graveyard lists software and hardware products, as well as Microsoft companies and studios.
MSN Music, for example, lasted just 2 years before it was shut down by Microsoft in 2006. It was designed to compete with Apple's iTunes service and store, but failed to attract enough attention.
Other highlights include Clippy, an annoying Office assistant, the artificial intelligence bot Tay, which lasted just a single day due to inflammatory tweets, or Tay's successor Zo, which survived 4 years.
The graveyard lists hardware products as well. Besides the original Xbox console and Xbox 360, it lists Windows Phone and Lumia devices, Microsoft Kinect, Band, and Microsoft Zune. Come to think of it, I did own all of these products, with the exception of Microsoft Zune.
Several game developers and studios are also on the list. It includes Ensemble Studios, known for its RTS games, Aces Game Studio, which worked on Microsoft Flight Simulator, or Lionhead Studios, known for Fable and Black & White.
Microsoft Graveyard is an open source project. You may contribute to the project on GitHub.
Closing Words
Microsoft Graveyard offers a trip down memory lane. Some will no doubt ask how Microsoft could have abandoned some of the listed products. Windows Phone was the best mobile operating system after all, right?
Now You: any product, service or studio that you are particularly sad about to find on the list?
I’ve used Windows since 3.1 release. Can’t say everyone version was good or even usable. But Microsoft always managed to recover from its misses. I see Microsoft as just trying to serve its investors and find revenue growth. Not sure they are focused much on what end users want.
I was one of those who upgraded to Windows 10 from Windows 7, I didn’t hold out too long. However, I will not touch 11 at all. What a bloated garbage OS.
Maybe a better link for an overall listing of programs:
https://microsoftgraveyard.com/
Windows Live Essentials still allows the installation of Movie Maker and PhotoGallery. Good ‘old PhotoStory still works on Windows 11. Maybe Live Writer as well. MS Collage Maker, Academic, if you can find the installation file, is one of the better programs.
The Flight Simulator was classic. Zune not so bad, but memory intensive. WordPad, a great loss.
Classic photo for the story!
It doesn’t even work. All I get is “An unhandled error has occurred. Reload”
Anyway, lets add Windows 11 to that list. Its a total failure and should be trashed.
Oh please, this isn’t so bad. You literally can’t have innovation and success without the flip-side, which is flops and fails, you literally need one to have the other. Some of these are fat Ls however some are either unremarkable or understandable.
The big difference as far as I could tell is that a lot more things in Google’s graveyard were companies it bought, whereas more of Microsoft’s flops are created by them.
Microsoft (imo) have made some poor decisions regarding what to keep developing and what to stop developing, many shots in their own feet in the process.
Some useful software in there though, plus some some nice concepts that could be remade today. Apparently before the picture manager, they had something with even more features! Because nobody should subject themselves to the torment of gimp/photoshop for basic photo editing.
“…Windows Phone was the best mobile operating system after all, right?”
Correct, it was. Lumia devices were great and even now I still don’t like Android and much prefer Windows Phone.
However, that was also during the days when Microsoft wasn’t run by a conman who’s MO was basically to layoff tens of thousands of people and just copy the worst parts of Google. In the era when Joe Belfiore would get on stage I was all in on Microsoft products and services, but in the short period since, I’m now down to just Windows 10 – and it has become abundantly clear I would be much more suited to MacOS now. Kind of humorous to look back at Satya’s “We want to move from people needing Windows, to choosing Windows and loving Windows” conman doublespeak.
To be fair it’s not like anyone really used the Google Podcasts app, podcasts are mostly an American phenomenon too. Americans are wealthy enough to have the time to listen to what’s basically a glorified radio for two or three hours a day, and even the ones that aren’t wealthy still often do these 2 hour drives to work that could use a little something to spice their boredom up.
I remember back in the early part of of this century around 2004 I think reading an article (more of a rant actually) written by a guy called F.W. Van Wensveen which ran into more than ten pages and entitled “Why I hate Microsoft” and published on http://www.vanwensveen.nl. Unfortunately, the site is no longer online although it can be downloaded from Scribd and parts of it like this one at https://dataswamp.org/~john/assets/writings/library/microsoft/IhateMS_6.html can be viewed without a problem.
Anyway, this individual was a tech at Microsoft if my memory serves me correctly, but left and wrote that article about everything which according to him was wrong at Microsoft. He pointed out among other things that Microsoft would buy up potential competitive companies with superior products and then shut them down immediately in order to stifle competition and not impede Microsoft’s own progress in the OS market.
It’s very unfortunate that to this very day that same attitude continues in the same vein at Microsoft.
“Microsoft would buy up potential competitive companies with superior products and then shut them down immediately in order to stifle competition and not impede Microsoft’s own progress in the OS market.”
Capitalism and settler colonialism at its best.
Louisiana Purchase: “In return for fifteen million dollars, or approximately eighteen dollars per square mile, the United States nominally acquired a total of 828,000 sq mi in Middle America.”
Actually, what was bought was the “preemptive right to obtain Indian lands by treaty or by conquest, to the exclusion of other colonial powers.” In other words, wholesale slaughter of Indigenous people.
https://www.science.org/content/article/native-tribes-have-lost-99-their-land-united-states
The map in the article metaphorically represents what Microsoft does if your information is correct.
The US and Britain have a way of leaving atrociously large “mass graveyards” of cultures and the people.
W11 is in the Microsoft Graveyard, however they still didn’t noticed! :X