zlacker

> No company would invest a massive amount of money in a duplicate product.

I don't mean to be rude, but have you worked at a very large company like Microsoft or Amazon or Google? Redundant products are par for the course because of the byzantine internal politics and funding structures of big companies.

>>spencz+(OP)
Big companies like Microsoft and Google like to burn products with little notice too.

>>m0xte+W3
...and small companies go under or radically morph their products.

There's this irrational demand vocal on social media that large corporations keep their products forever.

>>m0xte+W3
Google sure, but Microsoft? The company that kept the Zune service alive for 4 years after the product was EOL and with a userbase likely measured in the hundreds of thousands?

https://www.wired.com/2015/09/what-to-do-with-your-zune-rip-...

The company who STILL supports 16-bit apps?

https://www.groovypost.com/howto/enable-16-bit-application-s...

Ya... I would hardly say MS is known for killing stuff early - more like they've spent years being ridiculed for carrying baggage forward for decades longer than anyone else.

MS might be bad at a lot of things, but I'd hardly say they're known for "burning products with little notice".

>>m0xte+W3
That is true for Google, but certainly not for Microsoft. Microsoft's support for legacy software is pretty amazing actually.

>>tw04+nb
Then again there is this list of 346 discontinued Microsoft products, some of which had very short lifespans: https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-micros...

>>tw04+nb
Have you done any development work on .Net in the last 10 years or so. I've been buggered at least 5 times by massive discontinued chunks of stuff and the several reorganisations that got rid of my entire selection of enterprise customer and MS connect cases conveniently.

>>kerng+Wb
It's terrible. AppFabric, WCF, WWF, windows phone. I could go on for hours...

>>glenne+Ve
Yes, I would definitely hate to trust Microsoft with my enterprise software build pipeline because of how they refused to support Microsoft Bob.

>>glenne+Ve
well a lot of things in the business section had a different production which could directly import the data from the old one or different migrate the data. like business server essetnial or dynamics marketing most often the new stuff was more expensive. Even skype for business online is upgradable. some stuff has less features, like hotmail which could use all custom domain names and not only godaddy ones like outlook.

>>m0xte+ii
WCF is still supported and a lot of stuff works on .net core 3.x and more is coming in 5.x. webforms on the other hand... (which should die a more faster death)

>>JohnBo+Tp
Well, probably not because of Bob, but their cloud based offerings have make me wonder about trust.

- Business Contact Manager for Outlook, Outlook Customer Manager

- Microsoft Invoicing, Listings etc.

And these are critical applications for a company.

Have a look at Sharepoint which is widely used and has an uncertain future. Or the strategy behind Lync, Skype and now teams.

But we'll see. Microsoft has shifted in a good way in the last couple of years but their track record in keeping legacy operating system APIs for decades is not necessarily a good indicator of the stability of their other product lines.

>>spencz+(OP)
See this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22872556

>>tw04+nb
What about Atom/VSCode? Atom development looks dead to me:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21142934

https://github.com/atom/atom/graphs/contributors

>>koheri+g7
Sears is doing it!

>>sebst+2D
Sharepoint has an uncertain future? I had never heard of it a year ago, but as I got to know the "enterprise" space, it seems every large company is heavily invested in it. What might replace the need to share documents across a company in the MS world?

>>sebst+2D
Business Contact manager is still fully supported - it's just not supported on the latest version of outlook. On Outlook 2010 you've got support through the end of 2020. For Outlook 2013 they haven't announced an end-of-support date yet.

Microsoft Invoice has transitioned to a cloud-based product, so again, they didn't end support. You might not like the new purchasing model, but that's very much different than them burning the product to the ground.

https://einvoice.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?MSIStateKey=f513...

Sharepoint is the backend for onedrive for business, and fully integrated in to Teams. What on earth would make you think it's going away?