[grepLeigh]

As an outsider looking at Microsoft, I've always been impressed by the attention to maintaining legacy APIs and backward compatibility in the Windows ecosystem. In my mind, Microsoft is at the opposite end of the killedbygoogle.com spectrum. However, none of this is grounded in real evidence (just perception). Red Hat is another company I'd put forth as an example of a long-term support culture, although I don't know if that's still true under IBM.

I'd love to know if my superficial impression of Microsoft's culture is wrong. I'm sure there's wild variance between organizational units, of course. I'm excluding the Xbox/games orgs from my mental picture.

[iamdelirium]

I don't understand where this idea that Microsoft doesn't kill projects.

Zune, Games for Windows Live, Skype, Encarta, CodePlex, Windows Phone, Internet Explorer.

https://killedbymicrosoft.info/

[ascorbic]

Those mostly aren't counter-examples though. In most cases they supported them long after most people had stopped using them. Google is notorious for killing popular products.

[ljm]

Technically Edge as well, after they nuked their internal effort and switched to slapping Bing ads on a Chrome fork.

[bornfreddy]

Well, Skype is the only one I'd miss, and after years of neglect I won't cry after it either. As for IE - good riddance. They could add Teams and Sharepoint to that list as far as I'm concerned.

So maybe the difference is that Google kills projects that people love, while MS only kills unloved ones?

[grepLeigh]

Hah, this is exactly what I was hoping to find. Thank you!

[alternatex]

Forgot the most recent one - Skype.

[ahartmetz]

Joel Spolsky wrote about this. Windows division (WinDiv) is as you say, development tools division (DevDiv) is framework of the week. How many APIs have not-actually-replaced Win32 so far? They do keep the old ones working though, I guess.

[JambalayaJimbo]

I am working for an enterprise customer of a niche Microsoft product. They haven’t killed it yet, despite us being possibly their only customer.

However, their documentation and support is really scant.

[wkat4242]

It is but it's mainly to not bite the hand that feeds. Microsoft doesn't want to keep this stuff around, their enterprise customers do.

[__turbobrew__]

Red Hat killed CentOS and violated their support commitments so I wouldn’t trust them anymore.

[grepLeigh]

That was after the IBM acquisition.