8 Failed Microsoft products that really ruined company’s reputation

[Batu69]

 

Microsoft best know for Windows Operating Systems ,Windows Phone,Xbox ,Azure,Office etc. But these are not the only the only products the tech giant ever launched. There are some failed Microsoft products that really ruined company’s reputation.

In this article we are going to list these failed Microsoft products. All these unsuccessful Microsoft product suffered commercially a great loss.

Failed Microsoft Products :

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1. Windows Mobile :

Windows Mobile

Don’t be confused with Windows Phone, Windows Mobile launched in 2000 were the first mobile operating system developed by Microsoft for smartphones and Pocket PCs.  It was the most popular smartphone software in the U.S but its popularity faded with arrival of iOS and Android. Windows Mobile included an app store, a browser, and touch screen support. Microsoft stopped supporting Windows Mobile upon the release of Windows Phone 7 in 2012.

2. Zune :

Zune

Zune a brand of digital media products and services launched by Microsoft to compete with Apple’s iPod, which already sold more than 100 million units when Zune came to market. Zune was launched in November 2006 and product included a line of portable media players, digital media player software for Windows PCs, a music subscription service known as a “Zune Music Pass”, music and video streaming services for the Xbox 360 game console via the Zune Software, music, TV and movie sales, and desktop sync software for Windows Phone.

Zune took two years to sold hardly 2 million units so Microsoft was forced to shutdown unprofitable Zune services in June 2012.

3. MSN :

MSN

Almost 10 years before Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook and 15 years before WhatsApp, there was a Social Networking kinda service from Microsoft — named MSN where customers were IMing each other, setting a status message, and various other social networky things. Later in 2012 Microsoft discontinued MSN.

4. Windows ME :

Windows ME

Windows ME — one of the worst operating system Microsoft ever launched. Released after Windows 98 on September 2000 as a special millennium edition OS. Windows ME promised improved performance and accessibility but became an utter failure in the market. It was the last operating system released in the Windows 9x series. Because of its frequent crashing and incompatibility with several popular applications that ran on Windows 98 software forced Microsoft to ditch the OS after 1 year.

5. Windows Vista :

Windows Vista

Windows Vista launched in November 2006 after Microsoft’s still popular OS Windows XP. May be favourite for some people but the OS became a huge disaster like Windows ME  because of its bloat, its slowness, its hardware and software incompatibilities, its high cost, its confusing versions, its security fumbles and other ineptitude.

6. Microsoft Portrait :

Microsoft Portrait

 

Launched in late 1990s, Microsoft Portrait was a very low bit rate video conferencing software, that came before Skype. It supported MSN Messenger and Internet Locator Service (ILS) on PCs, Pocket PCs and Handheld PCs.

7. Terraserver :

Terraserver

Terraserver launched in 1997 was a Google Earth model project, before Google thought of it. With Terraserver could see your house, your neighbourhood, or a place you’ve never been before via satellite imagery. Later the service was discontinued in 1999.

8. Microsoft Bob :

Microsoft Bob

Microsoft Bob created in 1995 was a graphical user interface for Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. The program was intended to provide a more user-friendly interface but Microsoft Bob was greatly criticized in the press, did not gain wide acceptance with users, and was neither a successful nor long-lived product. The product was killed in early 1996.

 

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[Israeli_Eagle]

And...

 

9. Windows 10

 

 

[steven36]

At lest  they had sense enough too fix there problems   back then Windows ME was bad  but   it came out in 2000 by 2001 XP was out  they use to make a bad O/S and a good one . Back then people bought computers with all the Bugs Windows ME had  it still sold 200,000 copies in the 1st 3 days it sold OK  . Windows XlP only sold 300,000 copies in the 1st  3 days. Windows 10  was a free upgrade it was on 67 million PCs  by July 31st 2015.
 

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2585428/microsoft-windows/microsoft--early-windows-xp-sales-top-those-of-windows-95--me.html

http://www.windowscentral.com/report-windows-10-now-installed-67-million-pcs

See Windows  10  was not about selling PCs  its about making money off home users data and  renting it out too big enterprises.by the month Windows don’t really belong too you no way you just rent it for 10 years then people stop making things for it a few years latter  even if you don’t care about security .  Software code gets out dated  its job security.  But sooner or latter you run out of good ideas  and they not really sold much since windows 7  and  everyone is buying up phones.   Microsoft  all trough time have been big risk takers ,  If you’re not willing to take risk you stay small . Risk made Bill Gates the richest man in the world today.

 

[straycat19]

6 hours ago, Batu69 said:

Microsoft Bob

 

I kinda liked Microsoft Bob, but it would have probably done better if they called it Microsoft Bill.   What is truly amazing is that people were able to identify Me and Vista as junk and reject them but fell for Microsoft's marketing of 10.  Actually 10 is appropriate since on the scale 1 is best and 10 is worse.  (I learned that in Vietnam.  GI number 1, VC number 10)  The fact that Me and Vista failed (don't forget Windows 2000 in that group also) can also be attributed to the fact that enterprises typically skip every other version of Windows since they are generally on a 6 year computer replacement cycle which pretty well coincides with every other release of Windows.  Just hard to believe that there are 67 million idiots in this world.

[sedative]

And why was MSN a fail product?  I still rather used MSN then the Skype that we have today if i can.

[steven36]

50 minutes ago, sedative said:

And why was MSN a fail product?  I still rather used MSN then the Skype that we have today if i can.

Well MSN  was a niche  program ,  I rarely used it I used yahoo and another one .  MSN was around before everyone switched from Yahoo  to Google ,Facebook and Skype. Yahoo was the most visited site tell 2008 overtaken by Google.
 

Quote

In 2003, Microsoft announced that it would close "unregulated" MSN Chat rooms in 28 countries, including "most of Asia" due to problems with spam and concerns about child pornography, with plans to convert to a subscription model for "better accountability.Messenger chat services remained open.^[4] MSN Chat became a subscription service for $20/year.

On August 31, 2006 Microsoft announced that MSN Chat would no longer be provided. On October 16, 2006 MSN Chat shut down their servers at about 11:30 a.m. EST. The service closed as allegedly MSN no longer deemed it profitable to run as a subscription service

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_Chat

The reason MSN failed was due too pedos using  it, it had the sigma  about of what the darknet does today

[Pequi]

54 minutes ago, steven36 said:

The reason MSN failed was due too pedos using  it, it had the sigma  about of what the darknet does today

No, the reason MSN failed is because you could use pidgin and encrypt your messages. Easily.

Skype was backdoored even before M$ bought it.

[steven36]

1 hour ago, Pequi said:

No, the reason MSN failed is because you could use pidgin and encrypt your messages. Easily.

Skype was backdoored even before M$ bought it.

lol i don’t think in the early 2000s we even cared about encryption much , that was when the internet was the wild west , I striated using a VPN after they busted Megaupload  and they started  cracking down on P2P  in 2011 .  But the majority of the so called privacy advocates did not think anything was going on tell post Snowden ..They  were blind  and still  the masses are still blind .

 

 

Quote

By 2010, the NSA had developed “groundbreaking capabilities” against encrypted Internet traffic. A GCHQ document warned however “These capabilities are among the Sigint community’s most fragile, and the inadvertent disclosure of the simple ‘fact of’ could alert the adversary and result in immediate loss of the capability.”^[21] Another internal document stated that “there will be NO ‘need to know.’”Several experts, including Bruce Schneier and Christopher Soghoian, have speculated that a successful attack against RC4, a 1987 encryption algorithm still used in at least 50 per cent of all SSL/TLS traffic is a plausible avenue, given several publicly known weaknesses of RC4.^[27] Others have speculated that NSA has gained ability to crack 1024-bit RSA and Diffie Hellman public keys.^[28] A team of researchers have pointed out that there is wide reuse of a few non-ephemeral 1024 bit primes in Diffie–Hellman implementations, and that NSA having done precomputation against those primes in order to break encryption using them in real time is very plausibly what NSA's "groundbreaking capabilities" refer to

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-Record_Messaging

Even back in 2007 Pigeon encryption  was exploited  (backdoored )

Quote

In 2007 Olivier Goffart published mod_otr^[5] for ejabberd, making it possible to perform Man in the Middle attack on OTR users who don't check key fingerprints. OTR developers countered this attack by introducing socialist millionaire protocol implementation in libotr. Instead of comparing key checksums, knowledge of an arbitrary shared secret can be utilised for which relatively low entropy can be tolerated by using the socialist millionaire protocol.[

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin_(software)

By 2010 the NSA had perfected it  . But back in times of  9-11  no one cared about encryption  and  the NSA used it to there advantage and  really no one knows what the NSA has today  2013  was 3 years ago when Snowden ran

 

Back in 2007 i could of cared less but  Pigeon had 3 million users i never used it it was just a drop in the bucket  compared to all IM users that were online atm  Pigeon  never was successful ..The problem about IM is still  the same today It's just like email  if you’re friends don’t use  the same app  the encryption  want work . All of my friends  back then didn’t use encryption so what good would it of been? And 3 million users that were on Pigeon  most likely the NSA  was reading everything they said  back in 2007 

 

 

[Pequi]

15 hours ago, steven36 said:

And 3 million users that were on Pigeon  most likely the NSA  was reading everything they said  back in 2007

Good. I did my bit, wasted their time ....

;)

All we ever talked about were patients, my contacts were fellow doctors, and we all used encryption....