Microsoft is one of the world’s most valuable companies. What started with the DOS and Windows operating systems has snowballed into a company with its hands in gaming, robotics, farming, augmented reality, and more. (You can chase down a lot of new ideas when you employ 180,000 people.)
But inevitably Microsoft has killed countless products on its path to global domination. And you can see a long list of those products on the site Killed by Microsoft. It’s a sequel to Killed by Google, executed in exactly the same style (its creator, Fabiano Riccardi, built off the original project by Cory Ogden). These “Killed by” sites are a funny but informative way to skim through the products that time forgot, as each dead product is adorned with its own tombstone and a link to Wikipedia to learn more.
Truth be told, Killed by Microsoft doesn’t feature every product the company has iced since it was founded in 1975. The most notable recent absence is Tay, the racist AI that went berserk on Twitter back in 2016. The list is shorter than it might be. Notably it does not include several discontinued versions of Windows released over the years (not eventhe face-plant that was Windows 8’s Metro design language,a flat overhaulthat was so hated it forced Microsoftto bring its famous Start button back). Nor will you see the many Xboxes on the list or iterations of the AR headset HoloLens.Comic Chat may not have de-seated AIM, which was the biggest messenger of that era. But you can see how many of its ideas played out over a decade later. Today, Bitmoji people act out your words on Snapchat (Bitmoji itself originally began as an online, customizable comic book), and Apple’s memoji mascots are full-motion cartoon avatars for iMessages.
However, you won’t spot a bigger failure in the history of gadgets than the Microsoft Kin, which launched in 2010. It was Microsoft’s attempt to build a fun QWERTY phone like the Sidekick. But after just 48 days of dead sales, Microsoft pulled the phone despite an estimated $1 billion in development costs. It sold all of 503 units.
You’d think these mobile failures would be enough to kill not just a few Microsoft products but Microsoft as a company. Yet while the company could never beat Apple at its own game, Microsoft’s Office and its business-facing cloud services have allowed its fortunes to grow all the same. When Microsoft has failed to woo consumers, it’s always found a way to win over IT managers.
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