[SlavikCA]

The difference is that with Microsoft you often still can use unsupported product. You can use Windows XP today, even though it's not very useful.

But you can't use Google Reader or Google Wave in any shape or form.

[userbinator]

The community has actually come up with some very useful mods to XP, like drivers for newer hardware and backported patches for APIs which originally were only present in newer versions of Windows.

[brokenmachine]

>You can use Windows XP today, even though it's not very useful.

Will that be true for Win 10 or 11 though? Would they keep running forever without updates?

[daveoc64]

Yes they will work indefinitely. Why wouldn't they?

[abhinavk]

The machines won't be broken after October 2025. They will keep on working. The apps running on it will still get updates. The OS will not.

[danpalmer]

Microsoft has good backwards compatibility in general, but saying "you can't use Google Wave in any shape or form" isn't really true in spirit.

Much of the advance of Wave went into other products. Wave itself did not take off, but we have better chat, better email, better docs, all because of things pioneered in Wave. This is often the case with Google products disappearing, it's often because they've served their purpose and the technology has become normalised in other places.

Google Play Music is a good example of this. It was a technically capable product, but missing the market (in my opinion), and was turned into YouTube Music, a much better fit (again, opinion). Many product "deaths" are actually just a migration, or a recognition that the product is no longer necessary, and are better for it.

Apart from Reader. RIP Reader.