I remember when Microsoft discontinued Live Spaces, which held my blog. Obviously, I’ve been happily living in WP Land since them. I remember when Microsoft discontinued MS Money. I switched to Quicken and eventually switched back and lived with the limited functionality provided in the sunset edition. I remember when Microsoft discontinued Zune. I enjoyed my devices until the point that a Windows 10 update disabled the syncing capability in the Zune software, then they were thrown away. I remember when Microsoft discontinued the MS Band. I used it for another year after that and for whatever reason, I just started feeling jaded while wearing it. It sat on the shelf for months and eventually got thrown out.
It was only a couple of months ago Microsoft decided to discontinue the software that drives the Band. The hardware is useless without the software, so even if I did still have and want to slap the Band back on, I would have no way to use it. Along with that discontinuation, they are shutting down HealthVault. That is a major capitulation.
HealthVault was where the band stored all its data. It created nice graphs and charts and had the capability to hold all your medical history and data. It was the data repository for a lot of actual medical devices like scales and glucose meters and heart monitors. And it’s all going away. I took a look at my old data before it all disappears. It looks like my two MS Bands recorded data between 7/17/2015 and 1/28/2018. All my walks, all my sleeps, some random exercise sessions, and my daily step counts.
And this is something I want to say over and over and over. FUCK THE CLOUD. FUCK IT TO HELL.
The fact that you can’t own anything anymore is absolute bullshit. Let’s look at my history. Live Spaces was free and it was taken away. I was able to preserve my data my moving it to WordPress, which is also free and could disappear at any time. True, but, I can install WordPress on my own web server (and I do have an instance running on my web server!) and it will never go away again. MS Money was not free and was discontinued. I was able to keep using it afterwards. This is how things should be. MS Band was not free and was taken away. Microsoft offered refunds to recent Band purchasers, but the point is, the maker should not determine when you will stop using something you paid for. And all this cloud-powered bullshit, there needs to be an offline version available. Is there anything that can function anymore without being online??
And this whole, giant, disgusting concept of “it’s free as long as we want to make it available” has got to stop. It’s only a matter of time before people get burnt enough that they will refuse to use your products at all because it’s a given it will disappear at a random future date. Make a product, sell the fucking thing, and let people use it.
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