[ndduong]

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.

[al452]

Excellent site, love it.

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!

[dingo_bat]

The executable is still named lync.exe.

[ndduong]

That does sound like a horror story... I guess zombies still belong in the graveyard.

[Nexxxeh]

As a bit of a hijack, copy and paste is fucked.

But paste without formatting works, which is something like Shift+Ctrl+V.

Stupid, but just about usable if desperate.

[FussyZeus]

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.

[option_greek]

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.

[arthurcolle]

I actually like Lync. Why don't you?

[js8]

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.

[nkrisc]

I'd add: completely unreliable conversation history. I never figured out why it saved some messages but not others.

[murph-almighty]

Basically why I loved it when we started using Slack.

[arthurcolle]

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.

[danielvf]

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.

[Ecio78]

have you checked firewall issues? MS has a list of ips, urls and protocols that need to be open in order to use it.

[tinus_hn]

It is annoyingly in your face, ugly, slow and unreliable. It offers nothing that isn't done better by another program.

The only reason it can compete is because of Microsofts package deals and the anticompetitive integration with the rest of their ecosystem.

[unixhero]

Me too. It is a key tool for me as a PM. I have run meeting with hundreds on call.

[murph-almighty]

I currently use Lync for Mac, but we're "transitioning" to Skype for Business. I'm saddened to learn that it doesn't make a difference.

[ghostly_s]

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.

[krylon]

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.

[wlesieutre]

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.

[_qxjp]

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.

[ndduong]

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!

[whostolemyhat]

Those banner images are also way too big - they're 4800px x 3200px and 1.2mb, and take ages to load even on wired connections.

[balladeer]

Any plans for adding categories/tags and/or search functionality?

Putting alternatives there is quite good.

[justboxing]

Your UI & UX is amazing! I also love the following below each gravestone.

> Did you know _____ ? Please share a eulogy or funny story.

lol.

[fragmer]

Really interesting site to browse, thanks! I would love to see a screenshot or two added for each product, ideally captured back in its heyday/prime.

[balladeer]

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.

[ghostly_s]

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."

[_ZeD_]

I feel winamp should be here

[kenips]

That's cool. Definitely bringing some memories back. If scroll position is maintained when going back to the homepage I'd definitely stayed longer :).

[magic_beans]

How did you collect all the data?? Manually, or did users upload it themselves??

Looks great by the way!! Really interesting to peruse.

[ndduong]

The first set of data was sourced from https://siftery.com/, but I do plan on using user-uploaded data to help with data curation in the future.

[Frogolocalypse]

Lync is installed on my work laptop. Not quite graveyard yet...

[Rodd45]

This looks pretty good, I will check further later.

[Frogolocalypse]

Some to add :

Napster

Alta Vista

WinMX