In memoriam here’s some “tech stuff” we won’t have to kick around in 2014.
1: Google is always quick to introduce new things and just a fast to kick an ill-conceived product to the curb. Say goodbye to Google’s Reader and iGoogle. Reader has fallen victim as the popularity of RSS feeds has steadily declined over the past few years and iGoogle, a cool web app that allowed one to place widgets and other cool stuff on our iGoogle home pages just wasn’t interesting enough to keep our attention.
2: Twitter acquired then shortly thereafter pulled the plug on Posterous. Launched way back in 2008, it was supposed to challenge Tumblr as a blogging platform but since the acquisition by Twitter in 2011 it was totally ignored – only a matter of time…
3: Microsoft even dropped an old standby in 2013. How many hundreds of millions of Hot Mail users were moved over to Outlook.com. The transition was fairly seamless and since the service remains free for these users, no harm – no foul.
4: Tag, you’re out: another Microsoft wannabe. You may not even have heard of or seen it but this product was supposed to be the QR Code of the future. Unfortunately, Microsoft couldn’t unseat the original QR Code so Tag fell by the wayside. Oh, and for those folks who jumped on the Microsoft Tag bandwagon, Microsoft is giving you until August 19, 2015 to replace their scan-friendly platform.
5: Farewell to AltaVista, once the best of the bunch in search engines and long before Internet Search meant Google. AltaVista first appeared on the search engine scene in December of 1995 indexing around 20 million web pages at a time when 20 million was considered a lot of pages. Today, Google indexes pages in the tens of billions. AltaVista was purchased by Oveture in 2003 and then Yahoo bought Overture a year later. If you type in Altavista today, you’ll be taken right to Yahoo’s search. I’d choose Google instead.
6: Before iTunes… there was Winamp: a compact media player first released back in 1997. It set itself apart from the pack with a “skinnable” interface and every time the software booted, you were faced with a screen proclaiming “it really whips the llama’s a$$”. Winamp was bought by AOL in 1999 for $400 million. Winamp still has millions of users worldwide and employees estimate its yearly revenue at $6 million. December 20th 2013 was Winamp’s day of reckoning.
Here’s a few more: ESPN dropped its 3D sports channel, Apple quietly discontinued its Cards greeting card app replaced by iPhoto and Panasonic killed off Plasma TV’s instead moving towards the 4k Ultra HD technology.
What can we look forward to in 2014? Let’s wait until CES 2014 (Consumer Electronics Show) takes place January 7th through the 10th to delve further. Here’s a link from TechRadar.com to whet your appetite
http://www.techradar.com/us/news/phone-and-communications/ces-2014-what-to-expect-from-the-show-1193036
