KilledbyMicrosoft. Graveyard of Microsoft services, products, devices, and app

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https://killedbymicrosoft.info/

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windbg, SueW

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I still use Microsoft Money (the Sunset Edition released after Microsoft Money Deluxe support was discontinued) and Microsoft Works 9 (still have the original source discs) on all four of my personal computers (three with Windows 7 x64 sp1 and one with Windows 10 21H2). These software applications no longer connect directly to the internet, which is a good thing, since they are no longer supported; but both applications work just fine. I prefer the Microsoft Money personal finance software to any other personal finance software in use today, and have 21 years of annual archives from it stored on hard disks and backups. And I would rather have the Microsoft Works spreadsheet application that does not connect to the internet than today’s Office software that does. These software applications satisfy all my needs for spreadsheet and personal finance tasks and uses; and I see no reason to stop using them. They work just fine.

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wavy

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Alex5723 wrote:

https://killedbymicrosoft.info/

Microsoft killed Edge browser? What is it being replaced with?

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MS killed the original HTML version of Edge. Replaced by the Chromium version.

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Mele20

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Notable RIP mentions – Office viewers always handy for offline formatting checks when using office alternatives (still can) – Media Centre which was one of my star attractions in XP, Vista and Seven then a paid add-on in Windows Pro editions of 8 and 8.1 is where it was put on life-support 🙁

illegitimi Non Carborundum

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wavy

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I still use Microsoft Streets and Trips 2013. It remains the gold standard for mapping programs on PC, even though by now it’s years out of date. It is the one essential “can’t do without” Microsoft product for me, the only one I still use. I would buy a replacement in a second if they offered it (provided I could get it working in Linux via WINE or in a VM, of course).

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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Al Taylor

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Google Maps is the gold standard and it run everywhere.
If you need to use a map you just download it and use it offline.

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Anything Google is not welcome on my hardware. As much flak as I give Microsoft, Google’s a hundred times worse. While I’ve left Windows behind, I’m still willing to use some Microsoft applications if they are decent (like S&T). I also tried Edge for Linux… I didn’t find it to my liking, but I was willing to install it and try it. I’ve never had Chrome proper on any of my PCs, by comparison.

That said, I am not aware of any PC version of Google maps (Linux or Linux usable Windows application via WINE/Proton) as an actual program, let alone one that would allow me to download at once the entire US map for indefinite offline use, and without taking up monstrous amounts of disk space, and without ever signing in to Google.

The various mobile programs I’ve investigated as alternatives to Google maps do allow the download of Google map data (bitmapped tiles) but they warn that Google does not license their map data to be stored for offline use by third party programs. If you do it anyway, having thirteen or so zoom levels of tiled data for the entire US would take up huge amounts of space, and I am not aware of any way to download all of what I would need with a single command. That does not mean it doesn’t exist, of course, and I have not investigated it closely, as I don’t care much about mobile platforms, but at this time I am unaware of anything on mobile that would work as well, much less for a Linux PC.

S&T’s data is not as comprehensive as Google’s, but I don’t always need all of the data Google maps provide. The relatively svelte vector-format data included with S&T fits inside of a gigabyte, and it is all indexed for nationwide searching of street addresses, street names, place names, etc., without any internet connection.

The mobile Google Maps apps, from what I have been able to read on the topic, allow you to download offline maps for specified areas, not the entire US, and they’re good for all of fifteen days of offline use before Google deletes them for you. If you’re offline longer than that and you needed the data beyond that… well, too bad for you for not having a better data plan, I guess.

In MS S&T, I can copy-paste a series of addresses into the “find” window, and it will add a POI for each one. I can save the map locally with these new POIs, and I can have it create a route that will connect each POI in the shortest route possible, and I can save that route locally too. The ability to save locally is a must when there is no internet connection of which to speak.

I’ve yet to find anything like that on mobile, let alone on PC.

 

 

 

 

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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wavy

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Alex wrote: “If you need to use a map you just download it and use it offline.”

Right! For my needs, it is enough to get the map of a place, or of a road through a place, on my Mac’s monitor screen and either print the screen or take a snapshot and print that instead. (I am old school, so more comfortable with paper than with some portable device with a screen.)

I also use Google Earth to look at some city where I am planing to go, to see, for example where is the hotel relative to places I will have to be at (usually I am going to a conference, so where is the city’s Conference Center?) I also get maps from the AAA.

I also like to see both the cartographic map and the “satellite view” one, because that way I get a much better idea of where things are, what useful landmarks  look like, to orient myself by them once there.

That said, I think that search engines, the bread and butter of the likes of Google, are getting worse at finding what I am looking for.

When I enter the keywords and hit return, often most of what I get is useless, irrelevant, plain silly. I don’t get ads, because I use an Ad blocker, but it is frustrating. Putting the keywords between quotation marks makes no difference. My impression is that the search engines are in bad shape

If Google is making money out of my purloined data, they are defrauding whomever they sell my data, because if the intended result is personalized, very targeted content being fed to me, they are incredibly bad at getting this to work right.

As to still be using something from MS: Office 2016 at home. Office 365 at work: this one a requirement from above, not my idea. That’s it. There are no old MS applications, other than Office 2016, that I still need.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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The web site (https://killedbymicrosoft.info/) should add a panel for all the developer technologies depreciated or eliminated.

Microsoft Docs (https://docs.microsoft.com/) “replaced” Microsoft TechNet and MSDN documentation. MSDN subscriptions were “replaced” by
Visual Studio Subscriptions (https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/subscriptions/).

Example: Universal Windows Platform (UWP) Apps are on their way out:
https://www.thurrott.com/dev/258377/microsoft-officially-deprecates-uwp

I was happy never clicking on a UWP App until my desktop vendor forced me to on Windows 10. Thank goodness I mostly avoided that UI experiment.

Windows 10 22H2 desktops & laptops on Dell, HP, ASUS; No servers, no domain.

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Alex5723

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Of course, as everyone here knows, obsolescence does not happen just with Microsoft and Windows’ application and utility software. I have lived long enough to have worked, for years in each case, with no less than 10 different types of computers and their operating systems, even with several versions of the latter, to realize that software has a limited lifetime, like anything else made by humans. But often the time from brand-new to obsolescence of software is much shorter than for, let’s say, bicycles, that have been, an still are, available for buying and fully supported by bicycle mechanics.

I could, if I tried hard enough, write a list of all the software I have used and is now obsolete, but it would be too long and not very informative.

There have been cases where the persistence in use of really old software, because the computers used to run it were also very old by then, have presented potentially very serious problems.

Case in point: years ago (I believe this has been corrected by now) the computers used at airport control towers, besides being old (e.g. some were IBM 360 mainframes), used software equally old that was written in a language so old that it was getting progressively more and more difficult to get someone who knew it well enough to go and debug, patch or add something new to the existing code. So it was more like a question of sending the computers, software and all, to a “graveyard”, while replacing them with up-to-date ones, than sending to one without quotation marks whole planeloads of passengers.

That this has not happened, at least around airports, is an indication that the problem has been fixed, because flying is still quite safe, while the are more airplanes now in the air than in those days when I was reading in the news about this. But this happened and perhaps, in areas other than aviation, it might still be happening.

Does anyone here know about an example of that? I’ve heard, but only second-hand, that the US military used to keep old PCs in use because this were harder to hack, as their software was too old for most hackers to figure out how the computers worked.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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