Microsoft has a history of killing off really good apps, right when they’re in their prime. I look back at some of my favorites.
There’s no doubt that Microsoft is one of the more impressive technology giants. Over the years, and in the last few years in particular, it’s reinvented itself and its products. Windows 11 brought a massive redesign and new features, and Surface products have also risen up to be among some of the best laptops. Microsoft even positioned itself at the front of the AI arms race with Bing Chat and the upcoming Copilot. And let’s not forget Azure and Microsoft’s race to be one of the world’s best cloud service providers.
The reinvention at Microsoft, though, often means that good products end up getting the ax. — and no, I’m not just talking about Windows Phone. As a Microsoft fan who closely follows the company’s every move, there are five apps in particular that I feel Microsoft killed off too soon.
Let’s start with Cortana. While she was technically born in 2001 in the Halo video game franchise, the virtual assistant was born in 2014 with Windows Phones and eventually made its way over to Windows PCs on Windows 10. But it always had a popularity problem. Cortana came at a time when Siri was already booming and more feature-complete. Microsoft was busy adding features to Cortana that Siri already had, and people simply didn’t care about. This eventually led to Microsoft repositioning Cortana as an office assistant for writing emails and other tasks on Teams.
Now, with Microsoft going all-in on AI and using Copilot, the company has put Cortana on Windows to rest. The Cortana app on Windows 11 is ceasing to exist as a standalone app and has already started to be depreciated (although it’ll continue to exist on Outlook mobile, Teams mobile, Teams display, and Teams Rooms). This is fine since Copilot is basically better than anything Cortana would do. It can integrate with the operating system for switching a PC to dark mode, doing voice transcription, and more. Is Copilot Cortana reborn? We’ll soon find out.
As someone who owns a Windows PC and an Xbox, I always loved the Xbox Companion app. This app was launched back in 2014 and helped in integrating Xbox features on Windows PC, so you could see achievements, browse games, and access game captures.
