Windows Photo Viewer: Indeed, Microsoft has had several iterations of image viewers over the years. They all have nuances and pros/cons. But in the end, not everyone was happy about the "upgrades." WPV was deprecated and articles like this showed up: https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-get-windows-photo-viewer-...

Works: Works was a free (with new PCs) entry-level office suite. MS Office is of course not free. They are completely separate product lines that happen to share some (but not all) file formats.

Cobol: I believe Visual Studio only supported Cobol starting in 2015. That's a ~20 year absence from the original.

The list shows deprecated products that didn't have a specific drop-in, straightforward upgrade path for the end-user.

You also have the benefit of not having inconsistencies in file formats, which was always frustrating when working with Works and trying to edit files from Office.

[1] https://products.office.com/en-us/free-office-online-for-the...

This is to me a reminder that Google is more willing to push through newish markets (and sometimes destroy the emerging players as a side effect).

FrontPage getting buried doesn't hit hard because there was already dozen of other more interesting editors, and Frontpage never was the front runner nor did Microsoft really push for it to be the best.

Same for Skype, if tomorrow it was to be sunsetted, it wouldn't be without pain and it will piss a ton of people that use it daily, but that pain would be gone in 2 weeks once they get used to other messaging platforms.

In contrast people are still pissed at Google for many of their buried products that basically took down their market with them, or never get a better replacement.

I miss MSN so much. It was simple, worked with Pidgin, now I don't even know what new IM services even work with Pidgin in 2019.

In a perfect world I shoulda been able to use Slack, Discord etc on Pidgin still.

Skype, when WLM was shut down, was _very_ primitive in its communication options, let alone moderation tools. Sure, things like TeamSpeak and whatnot existed for organized voice chat, but that's not something my mother would be able to use. Skype didn't even have group voice calls back then, let alone video. Emoticons are still limited to the standard ones (or nowadays, seasonal sponsored emoticons), group chat moderation is limited to text commands with no accompanying visual interface (it is not even possible to show who is a group's moderator or owner). Heck, Discord and alike still don't even allow multi-window messaging!

Not to mention the client itself never lasted more than a couple years without a full interface redesign.

Of course, in an ideal world I'd love for some sort of standard interface that allowed me to locally confederate all my services, but sadly Slack and Discord both have TOS rules that require the use of _their_ client, even though their bot APIs are basically feature-complete.

There are quite a few examples of this, both industry wide and specifically from MS. Sometimes it is due to the first implementation being bad, sometimes it is that some part of the tech simply isn't quite ready (or isn't yet quite cheap enough for mass adoption), sometimes it is solving a problem that at the time is very niche but later becomes a more common need.

Think tablets. Anyone else remember MS's big "pen computing" push with tablet & hybrid style PCs that were too heavy, ran too warm, and didn't have batteries that lasted long enough? Or in a similar vain, more general and arguably more successful in their time, PDAs which died out but our phones basically now fill the same role.

There is no shipping messaging client that is a material improvement over what was available in 2000.

https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/ThirdPartyPlugins

Can I use them on Android?

Although it's probably the best voip and video conferencing software they have put out.

Skype and Skype for Business are almost completely unrelated, and barely interoperate.

Microsoft Works was always an odd duck -- a cut-down relative of Office (except not actually Office) for home users. Merging this into Office was a sensible decision that should have happened many years ago, TBH.

Multitasking OSes? Nope - not in the early-mid 1980s.

You want to use another app? Save your work, quit your current app and launch the new app.

Cooperative multitasking eventually arrived, but if you didn't have enough RAM, it would be painful to switch amongst multiple apps.

Then there's the cost of the apps. You want a word processor? ~$250. Spreadsheet? Another ~$250. Presentation app? guess what? Another ~$250.

Or you can buy one of these new-fangled integrated apps that include word processor, spreadsheet, graphics, database and some other stuff. These integrated apps were jack-of-all-trades going for the 80% functionality that people needed. All for the price of one of the dedicated apps.

AppleWorks, MS Works, Ashton-Tate Framework filled a need at the low end.

There were always going to be users who didn't want/need the full functionality of a typical dedicated word processor/spreadsheet or didn't want to pay for features they didn't need/use.

Once Excel was fleshed out and MS bought Powerpoint, the Office suite of apps was born, priced at less than the total cost of the 3 individual apps.

The standalone desktop apps were living on borrowed time.

Works was included with computers. You could also buy it separately, but a lot of users got it with their computer.

More accurately Web Matrix => VS Code

Projects evolve, Frontpage was a dead road. It evolved somewhat, but it finally came together with VS Code.

What is more popular now to develop web projects than VS Code?

Also there was Microsoft Expression Web, also EOL.

I’m remembering a deal Microsoft made with Adobe to stop making Microsoft Expression products in exchange for more platform support, or something. I forget the details.