Microsoft is an old company (at least in technological terms) and a very successful one, but not all the products it makes are a success.
For every Windows 7, there are Games for Windows Live. In every Microsoft Office there is a Clippy.
To help people remember and revisit memories of Microsoft products from the past, a group of developers and technology enthusiasts have created an open source site called Microsoft Graveyard.
If this sounds familiar to you, it's probably because you've come across Killed by Google, a similar website created by Cody Ogden, another developer and tech enthusiast, but for outdated and discontinued Google products. Ogden created an analogous website for Microsoft products called Killed by Microsoft, and that largely inspired the creation of Microsoft Graveyard.
Welcome to the (unofficial) Microsoft graveyard
In Microsoft Graveyard, you can examine the various products, services, applications, and other creations that Microsoft launched and ended up abandoning, both software and hardware.
There's a lot to think about, as many people who have used computing or mobile products for any part of their lives have probably come across at least a couple of these. I know there is, and there's also a lot to learn about many of Microsoft's attempts at innovation over the years (the Microsoft Graveyard entries are in chronological order).
The unofficial archive of discontinued Microsoft products was created by Victor Frye and a community of Microsoft enthusiasts, and was released last week. The group calls the website “a passion project created because we have 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 who grew up in the early stages of the Internet as we know it now, and Kinect was a motion-sensing game controller that was murdered just last year.
Take a trip down memory lane to read about things like Windows Phone, Zune, Cortana, the recently “deceased” Clippy, and many more. Each entry is headed by the name of the product, which links to a page where you can find more details about it (sometimes a Wikipedia page). This was followed by the shelf life of the product and a paragraph description of the product.
Go and see for yourself, maybe even participate.
When you visit the website, you may notice that the first few entries are dated in the future and the icons are coffins rather than tombstones. This is to indicate which Microsoft products will join the rest of the discontinued “dead” products on the list in the near future. This includes products like Windows 10 (which still features minor tweaks and updates), the Xbox 360 Store, and others.
If you're intrigued, I urge you to try Microsoft Graveyard for yourself. Since it's an open source project on GitHub, you can join in the fun of building, contributing to, and maintaining the website. You can also follow ongoing development and project updates on Threads.
