A cemetery for products that are no longer with us.
A public archive of discontinued startups, apps, and internet software — and the lessons they left behind.
“Users loving your product does not always mean the company owning it will keep it alive. Passionate niches can be too small for tech conglomerates yet viable for independent businesses.”
Recently Buried
12 GravesBrowse stylized tombstone memorials, pay digital homage, and study post-mortem wisdom.
Google Reader
“The RSS reader that made the web feel hand-curated.”
“Users loving your product does not always mean the company owning it will keep it alive. Passionate niches can be too small for tech conglomerates yet viable for independent businesses.”
Google Stadia
“The future of gaming arrived before broadband infrastructure was ready.”
“Tech capability is not product strategy. Even revolutionary streaming latency cannot overcome an unappealing business model and lack of killer content.”
Vine
“Do it for the Vine. Six seconds that reshaped internet culture forever.”
“If you do not build a sustainable economic engine for your top creators, another platform will happily write them checks.”
Artifact News
“Exquisite typography and AI summaries, laid down with dignity by its creators.”
“Sometimes a product is loved by a loyal demographic, but the total addressable market simply does not justify venture scale.”
Parse Backend
“The backend that let one engineer ship apps for millions.”
“Relying on a proprietary BaaS cloud owned by an ad-tech giant creates existential platform risk for third-party builders.”
Sunrise Calendar
“A calendar that actually brought joy to scheduling.”
“Great design makes you a prime acquisition target, but independent survival requires owning your distribution or enterprise monetization.”
Google+
“You cannot mandate social graphs with single-sign-on popups.”
“Forced distribution is not retention. You cannot engineer organic social intimacy through corporate mandates.”
Inbox by Gmail
“Bundles, snoozes, trips, and zero inbox nirvana.”
“When building an experimental reimagining of a core product, protect the power-user workflow that made users fall in love.”
Periscope
“The raw, unfiltered live streams that put heart animations on our screens.”
“A standalone utility feature often gets absorbed into parent feeds or commoditized by incumbent networks.”
Pebble Smartwatch
“Long live the 7-day battery and always-on e-paper display.”
“Hardware is unforgiving. High manufacturing capital requirements leave almost zero margin for inventory forecasting mistakes.”
Google Wave
“The tool so futuristic that nobody knew what to actually use it for.”
“If you cannot explain in one sentence what problem your product solves for a specific persona, technology marvels will still gather dust.”
Quibi
“Raised $1.75B to discover people wanted memes, not 8-minute thrillers while walking.”
“Capital is not a substitute for customer empathy. Spending hundreds of millions on premium production cannot manufacture organic consumer habits.”