Hi, I'm the creator of Product Graveyard, a fun way to keep track of and commemorate our favorite products that are with us no more.
I worked on this as a side project during my summer internship at Siftery. For building the site, I used a bootstrap grid for front-end structure and node.js to help with filtering and inserting the data.
Please join in by contributing a funny story or eulogy for one of the featured products.
I can't provide a funny story or eulogy, but have a scary one... "Microsoft Lync" [item 10 on the list right now] is not dead, it's aaaalllliiiiivvveeeee...
Those of us who work in the nightmare planes, where Microsoft products are mandated, once hoped that Microsoft's "Skype for Business" would bring us a bit of non-corporate real-world better-because-it-had-to-compete-on-its-own-merits product to save us from the eternal pain of Lync.
But no, it turned out that "Skype for Business" REALLY IS just Lync, with only two changes.
1) rebranding
2) somehow, despite changing almost nothing, they managed to break copy-and-paste, it doesn't work reliably any more
Our office still uses Lync as the backend for VOIP. It is the bane of my existence, somehow they managed to work every single Microsoft anti-pattern into this product.
Yes. And the UI sucks as bad as the older one. I can't believe such a poor product with constant UI freezes is still in production. Time gap from launching to the point of usability on this atrocious piece of shit is an incredible 1 min on my modern PC. This is one product I hope everyday to see on this product graveyard.
I hate it, for several reasons (some of it could be user error or local configuration, but still):
- For a long time, the status of other users it showed was completely off. Like showing people online when they weren't. Also, sending messages sometimes mysteriously failed.
- Cannot copy conversation as text (formatting is messed up). Cannot save it as text without removing smileys.
- Cannot paste text verbatim into conversation without making silly smileys everywhere.
- There is a (relatively small) limit on how much text you could paste in.
- Couldn't transfer certain files (like .js or .exe).
Many of these things make sense for things like unmoderated chat, but I need to work, and sometimes exchange larger amounts of text and binary data.
You are so right haha. I guess working at a bigco has trained me on it and also because of the (relatively) "pretty" UI. Ive used Slack for side projects and its definitely a lot smoother/modern.
I'm not the GP, but I have a client who uses Lync. We usually have conference calls with three or four people, and someone always has an audio problem.
The screen sharing also seems to take a while to sync up. Worse, it silently stops updating somewhere in the call. Lync seems to have the worst real world performance of any screen sharing / conferencing app I've used.
Unlike the Windows client (of course!) the Mac S4B client is in fact a complete re-write compared to Lync for Mac. It is still horrible, in different ways (of course!) than the Windows client, but generally is a modest improvement on Lync for Mac.
Windows Lync>Skype for Business is literally a registry key you roll out that changes the name and some minor interface chrome.
Now you made me remember how much I miss GrooveShark...
Also, the list makes me realize a problem with putting everything "in the cloud": with a traditional desktop application, if the vendor goes belly up or just doesn't feel like working on it any more, at least you can keep using the version you already have. If the whole thing runs on the web, and the vendor decides to pull the on those servers, it's just gone.
Been saying this for years. Gaming has some egregious examples like Diablo 3 where the single player mode turned into "multiplayer server with nobody else in it" and if your internet connection goes down or battle.net has problems you can't play the game at all.
Blizzard has a good track record of supporting old games, and as a studio I think they'll be around for a long time, but they won't be forever.
I recently read that Shadow of War is similarly always-online single player. And I have much less faith in Warner Brothers Games to keep that running than I do in Blizzard.
I love the design of Product Graveyard! Personally, I would’ve gone with darker colors, seeing as it fits the whole “graveyard” theme.
One nitpick: isn’t it inefficient to generate a unique banner image for every dead product? Each one is largely the same, except for the product logo being in the center. Would help to remove these banners or compress them so pages load faster on mobile.
Thanks for the feedback! In terms of the color scheme, I wanted to make Product Graveyard an inspiring place where we can honor great products and be thankful that they were once in our lives. Hence, the brighter colors and the more cheerful tone to it.
As for the banner, I will definitely make this improvement in the future. Thanks for the suggestion!
delicious.com is dead but del.icio.us is alive - in read only format. Archived as it was in the beginning. Just logged in and could see my bookmarks. At least that seems to be the plan of idlewords.
Apps are not listed? Like Sparrow is missing - the email client killed by Google.
del.icio.us was the original URL of the site, delicious.com was never anything but an alternate URL. And I wouldn't call a bookmark service that you can't save bookmarks to, "alive."
https://bazqux.com/ was the closest i found in terms of UI and performance with the amount of feeds/items i go through (~1000 items/day) - Been pretty happy with it since Google Reader shutdown
I don't read 1000/day, but I do step through 1,000 - I scan a headline/summary, hit "j" and move on for the vast majority of them. Some i'll star and come back to later, for others the first sentence of the summary is really enough to learn something about what's going on.. eg "vulnerability found in XYZ" is useful to tuck away in the back of my mind, but that's all i need.
Others are the same story reported by multiple sources; obvious from the headline.
I leave it open in a pinned tab and when i want to kill a minute or two, i'll scan through a few more posts and open a few to actually read.
The reason i like Bazqux is that it can keep up no matter how fast i hit "j". It's no prettier than Google Reader does, has few more bells/whistles, but if you really want to speed through items, save and search, it's great.
In reality, I would like something that combined Bazqux with some ML to recognize that an item is a dupe, or something i'm really not likely to be interested in and filter those thousand items down to a few hundred, but i've yet to see anything really achieve that.
> In reality, I would like something that combined Bazqux with some ML to recognize that an item is a dupe, or something i'm really not likely to be interested in and filter those thousand items down to a few hundred, but i've yet to see anything really achieve that.
About a decade ago - when the state of the art really wasn't up to it yet - I invested some money in a start-up that was attempting to achieve just that. They eventually turned to greener pastures and are still alive but I am still hopeful that someone will manage to put this together. I'd be more than happy to pay for such a thing.
I'm a big fan of The Old Reader. The UI is quite similar to Google Reader (as I remember it), and because it's only focussed on feeds it's not cluttered with other functionality. There's even a working Windows Phone app (TORUC) for those of us still avoiding Apple or Google.
I've taken out a subscription in the hope that it will last longer than Google Reader or Bloglines (anybody remember that?).
Are you an Emacs user? My journey was Google Reader -> Newsblur -> elfeed (on Emacs). I only abandoned Newsblur because of an ongoing project to Emacsify my digital life.
IMO - and I speak as someone who loves Emacs so much he has email, organisation, TODOs, calendaring, IRC, RSS and more in Emacs - vi actually does a better job of the mechanics of text editing.
Evil gives you the best of both worlds - the Emacs platform, and vi editing.
What I find really interesting about lists like this one is that many of the entries are really great ideas that only failed due to poor timing or bad luck or a single error. The fact that someone failed to build something huge the first time around is not evidence that copying one of the entries wouldn't work now. It's just really hard to know which idea might work if it launched today instead of two years ago.
In reality, your IT admins have control of a GPO/registry key that will declare whether your client should be called "Lync" or "Skype for Business" when you launch it. In typical Microsoft wisdom, I guess they provided this to prevent too much culture shock in the transition. You're using the Skype for Business client with the "Lync" skin.
This is actually one of the reasons I do a lot of non-tech hobbies like woodworking and making wine. So much of what I do is ephemeral. It exists as bits stored in a computer, it not something I can physically touch. Literally everything I've ever written at work could, and probably will, cease to exist one day.
But the wine rack I made and the bottles in it aren't going anywhere. Well, okay the bottles will, but there will be more. :)
Funny, I've gone down the same path. I enjoy woodworking quite a bit. One of the strangest things in a craft like woodworking (compared to software) is that once it's finished, it's finished. I built a table for our startup office, and it's the one thing I've built at work that I never have to update or fix.
I've also mixed that in with some 3D printing and CNC builds that sort of blend the two worlds together.
I have never tried it but I increasingly find myself pulled by carpentry. I have no solid reasoning for this. It's just a connotation if I may say so. So feel of the wooden furniture. My thoughts about preserving them and how I like antique or older (and actually simpler but functional) study desks. How, whenever I think of buying one, I never find the exact study desk I want and it seems like a good idea to make my own. I think I should just get a kit and start with something simpler like a sitting stool, or a pen holder.
Do it! :)
I do green wood carving myself, which is very satisfying, but when I have the space I'm definitely going to start making my own furniture. A desk is high up the list, as I don't think I've found a single one that works for me.
Makes you reflect on the ephemerality of life - entire civilizations that existed for thousands of years have come and gone. A computer program that's been around for 10 years has had a good run.
That was adopted by the Apache Foundation and is still under active development. It was opened up and turned in to "Wave In A Box" that you can run on your own server. https://incubator.apache.org/wave/
I just added Google Wave as a featured product! Thanks for the feedback. Although it is technically open-source and operated by another company. We can still say Google Wave is dead but just under a different skin. I guess it's another zombie
Well it would be like once per month, 6 months or even once a year. The issue with not doing it is that I will never ever open the site again. But if I got an email in a year I'd definitely do it to see what died, if anything.
I feel the worst for Meerkat. They basically had a few weeks between blowing up huge at SXSW and then getting effectively shut down by Twitter with the launch of Periscope.
You had to create an account and I refused. One user lost. Periscope had Twitter accounts at least. I hate creating accounts before seeing the product.
Just a small thing that bother me is that on my desktop machine, the second column is not aligned as neatly as the others (due to two lines descriptions maybe ?)
From the feedback here in HN it seems clear that you need a "suggest product" button. Maybe it could even be a Disqus on the bottom on the home page, which would automatically give you up/down votes functionality (;
We actually do have a suggest product button on Product Graveyard! If you click into any of the products and click the "Submit Autopsy Report" button in the nav bar, it should take you to a form where you can suggest which product we should feature next. Here is the direct link to it: https://siftery-track.typeform.com/to/n5IT7u
If you are going that far back how about including the original LapLink (and intersvr in MSDOS6 that implemented similar features). Pushing files over null-modem or the parallel port equivalent for extra speed was a godsend back when proper networking was relatively rare at home (or in small offices) so floppy-net was the main alternative.
The company still exists (was "Travelling Software, now renamed to Laplink Software) but obviously that specific product is pretty meaningless in today's environment unless you are playing with museum-piece hardware for nostalgia/shits/giggles.
I love everything about this except the name. To laypeople, "product" != "software product", and it's revealing your bias. Why don't you just call it Software Graveyard?
That's a valid point. There's definitely a software bias now, but the name product is more extensible. I just added 4 more featured products today and will be adding more in the future!
Great job, this is a fun concept that is well executed.
I was going to add Geocities, but I was surprised to find out that it is still available in Japan. Anyone have insight as to why Yahoo kept it alive in that market?
Yahoo! Japan was a joint partnership of Yahoo! and SoftBank. From what I could tell while working at Yahoo!, Yahoo Japan was able to use whatever software they wanted from Y!, but whatever they developed wasn't accessibly by the rest of Y!
So, they had their own installation of geocities, and didn't need to take it down. Yahoo auctions is also big in Japan, but was killed everywhere else. (Edit: change was to is)
Congrats on making such a neat site! It's quite interesting to see all the dead products and services that (often) never quite achieved their full potential.
That said, one thing does bother me here, and I'm not sure whether it's a mistake or not.
Basically, the all products lists don't seem to link to the individual pages for the closed products. In most cases that's likely fine (since I doubt you have separate pages for every single product listed), but it would be convenient to have them link to the product's page for more details when they're available.
Huh, I knew I had a zombie bitcasa account that I assumed I'd been paying for but was too lazy to cancel, and was surprised to see it on your list! I think there's a market for a product that individually curates a person's miscellaneous accounts (say it watches your bank/credit card accounts or whatever) and alerts them when fees increase or the company goes bankrupt or it looks like a zombie account (and maybe offer to close it for $10 ($30 for comcast)).
Thanks for the feedback. There's now a navigation bar for easy access to "all products". All products should include featured products now, and I will be implementing search in the near future :)
Last year I found a windows version of it online and found it still usable even in windows 10. Very unsafe I know - I did use ProcExploer+VirusTotal to check its binary signatures on 60+ scanner sites.
It still much better/faster than the native Win10 Cortana search.
Love the site! However, it looks like you have some apps listed on the main page, but not in the list of all apps. For example, I submitted Aperture because I couldn't find it in the "A" section of the list of all apps. But I see that it is actually there on the main page near the bottom.
Good point, it saved Apple at that time... still miss it. I also used it to learn coding for Windows from macOS. Their line for their cross compiling tools was funny "Being there without having your hands dirty" :-)
Related, Gobe Productive. Vaguely similar to Microsoft Works in that it incorporated basic word processing, spreadsheet and vector art functionality, but you could do all three as tabs within any single document.
Originally came out for BeOS, then there was a Windows version.
I worked on this as a side project during my summer internship at Siftery. For building the site, I used a bootstrap grid for front-end structure and node.js to help with filtering and inserting the data.
Please join in by contributing a funny story or eulogy for one of the featured products.
I can't provide a funny story or eulogy, but have a scary one... "Microsoft Lync" [item 10 on the list right now] is not dead, it's aaaalllliiiiivvveeeee...
Those of us who work in the nightmare planes, where Microsoft products are mandated, once hoped that Microsoft's "Skype for Business" would bring us a bit of non-corporate real-world better-because-it-had-to-compete-on-its-own-merits product to save us from the eternal pain of Lync.
But no, it turned out that "Skype for Business" REALLY IS just Lync, with only two changes. 1) rebranding 2) somehow, despite changing almost nothing, they managed to break copy-and-paste, it doesn't work reliably any more
It's a zombie horror story!
But paste without formatting works, which is something like Shift+Ctrl+V.
Stupid, but just about usable if desperate.
- For a long time, the status of other users it showed was completely off. Like showing people online when they weren't. Also, sending messages sometimes mysteriously failed.
- Cannot copy conversation as text (formatting is messed up). Cannot save it as text without removing smileys.
- Cannot paste text verbatim into conversation without making silly smileys everywhere.
- There is a (relatively small) limit on how much text you could paste in.
- Couldn't transfer certain files (like .js or .exe).
Many of these things make sense for things like unmoderated chat, but I need to work, and sometimes exchange larger amounts of text and binary data.
The screen sharing also seems to take a while to sync up. Worse, it silently stops updating somewhere in the call. Lync seems to have the worst real world performance of any screen sharing / conferencing app I've used.
The only reason it can compete is because of Microsofts package deals and the anticompetitive integration with the rest of their ecosystem.
Windows Lync>Skype for Business is literally a registry key you roll out that changes the name and some minor interface chrome.
Also, the list makes me realize a problem with putting everything "in the cloud": with a traditional desktop application, if the vendor goes belly up or just doesn't feel like working on it any more, at least you can keep using the version you already have. If the whole thing runs on the web, and the vendor decides to pull the on those servers, it's just gone.
Blizzard has a good track record of supporting old games, and as a studio I think they'll be around for a long time, but they won't be forever.
I recently read that Shadow of War is similarly always-online single player. And I have much less faith in Warner Brothers Games to keep that running than I do in Blizzard.
One nitpick: isn’t it inefficient to generate a unique banner image for every dead product? Each one is largely the same, except for the product logo being in the center. Would help to remove these banners or compress them so pages load faster on mobile.
As for the banner, I will definitely make this improvement in the future. Thanks for the suggestion!
Putting alternatives there is quite good.
> Did you know _____ ? Please share a eulogy or funny story.
lol.
Apps are not listed? Like Sparrow is missing - the email client killed by Google.
Looks great by the way!! Really interesting to peruse.
Napster
Alta Vista
WinMX
Please enlighten me, it sounds like you hold a secret that would substantially improve my life.
Others are the same story reported by multiple sources; obvious from the headline.
I leave it open in a pinned tab and when i want to kill a minute or two, i'll scan through a few more posts and open a few to actually read.
The reason i like Bazqux is that it can keep up no matter how fast i hit "j". It's no prettier than Google Reader does, has few more bells/whistles, but if you really want to speed through items, save and search, it's great.
In reality, I would like something that combined Bazqux with some ML to recognize that an item is a dupe, or something i'm really not likely to be interested in and filter those thousand items down to a few hundred, but i've yet to see anything really achieve that.
> In reality, I would like something that combined Bazqux with some ML to recognize that an item is a dupe, or something i'm really not likely to be interested in and filter those thousand items down to a few hundred, but i've yet to see anything really achieve that.
About a decade ago - when the state of the art really wasn't up to it yet - I invested some money in a start-up that was attempting to achieve just that. They eventually turned to greener pastures and are still alive but I am still hopeful that someone will manage to put this together. I'd be more than happy to pay for such a thing.
I've taken out a subscription in the hope that it will last longer than Google Reader or Bloglines (anybody remember that?).
Last I checked alternatives, I liked g2reader.com slightly better than theoldreader.com, though I use it just very occasionally.
https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil
IMO - and I speak as someone who loves Emacs so much he has email, organisation, TODOs, calendaring, IRC, RSS and more in Emacs - vi actually does a better job of the mechanics of text editing.
Evil gives you the best of both worlds - the Emacs platform, and vi editing.
I'm using it right this minute: http://imgur.com/a/qQ648
http://productgraveyard.com/products/lync.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_for_Business
But the wine rack I made and the bottles in it aren't going anywhere. Well, okay the bottles will, but there will be more. :)
I've also mixed that in with some 3D printing and CNC builds that sort of blend the two worlds together.
I also would appreciate a gallery of screenshot for each product to get a feel for what it was.
No justice in this world.
Just a small thing that bother me is that on my desktop machine, the second column is not aligned as neatly as the others (due to two lines descriptions maybe ?)
FF 55.0.2 on Ubuntu 16.04.3 with uBlock and Privacy Badger
https://kek.gg/i/3kytsn.png
(probably an argument for min-height)
##img[alt="Vine"]
Arguably an issue with the filterlist being too broad. Changing the alt-text would probably work as a workaround for now.
Overall though, I think the site is great!
Man, I totally didn't realize that Vine died. It feels like just yesterday I was... watching Vines on YouTube. hmm
The company still exists (was "Travelling Software, now renamed to Laplink Software) but obviously that specific product is pretty meaningless in today's environment unless you are playing with museum-piece hardware for nostalgia/shits/giggles.
I was going to add Geocities, but I was surprised to find out that it is still available in Japan. Anyone have insight as to why Yahoo kept it alive in that market?
So, they had their own installation of geocities, and didn't need to take it down. Yahoo auctions is also big in Japan, but was killed everywhere else. (Edit: change was to is)
You know you've made it when you get a Truncation nickname in Japan (sort of like the Hollywood couples names like bennifer) "yafuoku"
That said, one thing does bother me here, and I'm not sure whether it's a mistake or not.
Basically, the all products lists don't seem to link to the individual pages for the closed products. In most cases that's likely fine (since I doubt you have separate pages for every single product listed), but it would be convenient to have them link to the product's page for more details when they're available.
http://productgraveyard.com/see-all-products-a.html
Other than that, it looks pretty good.
1. On mobile I have to scroll past all the featured products to get to "all products". A link at the top or a hamburger menu would be great!
2. No search?
3. "all products" doesn't appear to include "featured products"? For instance Picasa and Google reader are in featured but not in all.
Other than that its a lovely design and a good concept. Well done.
Last year I found a windows version of it online and found it still usable even in windows 10. Very unsafe I know - I did use ProcExploer+VirusTotal to check its binary signatures on 60+ scanner sites.
It still much better/faster than the native Win10 Cortana search.
Love know if there any open source clone of it?
That's not true, it was notably different than the two, it was replaced by Adobe XD.
I mean, yeah, it's been like 20 years so I'm not surprised
But it's still sad
Ok here then:
Foldershare
Great peer to peer file sync tool.
Acquired by Microsoft and shut down. Slowly shaking head
Originally came out for BeOS, then there was a Windows version.