I came away with the same conclusion reading this and the Google sites, but I do feel like these sites nonetheless do a public service aggregating and organizing this kind of information, even if it feels pointed at MS/Google specifically.

Yeah, sometimes I wish MS would be a little more aggressive about killing off products. There are a few developer technologies that are in an awkward no man’s land: just barely supported without much of a future, but MS won’t say that so it makes for a lot of confusion if you’re new to the space and wondering what technology to use.

Likely they don't kill them because they have customers and have contracts stating support for X years.

Not sure why people are surprised, its enterprise software. Look at SAP, they "kill" their ERP every few years for end-of-life and upgrades. I don't blame them, customers don't sign perpetual deals and they expect to sign a new ones every 5-7 years for whatever the new flavor is. It's different for free products because there is no explicit end of life and it surprises people.

I am still salty about how badly they ruined Skype, though.

Skype was amazing until it was acquired.

Would Zoom even exist today if Microsoft never bought Skype?

Yes, their proprietary scalable video codec is what makes the difference.

It's miles ahead any competition and pretty much the only tool which will give you decent calling experience on spotty connections.

Before zoom I was mostly doing audio calls on a computer, with zoom video is easily manageable (actually, not sure if that's a plus for society, it certainly increased the meetings / productiveTime ratio).

True but I believe Skype P2P mechanism is dead end on current computing environment. Few companies like Microsoft can host servers for such free services.

I wish more things like Silverlight were open sourced for the community at EOL.

There is https://www.opensilver.net/ Not sure if any is MS contributed. And I’m not sure I can recommend it as a platform. I never quite bought into XAML over HTML/CSS/JS. I’ve done both, and just would rather build a web app than XAML for most of the type things I build.