Tag Archives | Microsoft Flight Simulator

Microsoft Flight Simulator: It Lives!

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 17, 2010 at 5:54 pm

It was one of Microsoft’s oldest, most loved applications, and as of early 2009 it appeared to be dead meat. I speak of Microsoft Flight Simulator, which by Microsoft’s math launched 28 years ago. (I date its origins to an earlier non-Microsoft version called SubLOGIC Flight Simulator and therefore consider it to be thirty years old.)

Anyhow, among the news at the Gamescom conference in Cologne, Germany is that reports of Flight Simulator’s death turned out to be premature.  Microsoft’s bringing it back under the name Microsoft Flight. So far, it’s only teasing us about the details, but it seems to be aiming for a wider audience of non-flightsim geeks, and adding social features.

Here’s the preview:

I was never a serious Flight Simulator enthusiast, but this development still warms the cockles of my heart. A Microsoft exec I spoke with today didn’t spill any secrets about the new version–but he did say it’ll be a rebooting a la JJ Abrams’ Star Trek. How many technology products from the early 1980s are available in any form whatsoever?

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Microsoft Kills Off Money. What’s Next?

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 11, 2009 at 8:18 am

Microsoft MoneyIt’s not the least bit surprising, but now it’s official: Microsoft is discontinuing its personal-finance program, Money, after ending updates and yanking the application out of retail stores last year. The program joins Encarta and Flight Simulator among famous, venerable Microsoft products whose lives are coming to an end.

I don’t see this as bad news for Microsoft. Actually, it’s an encouraging sign of rational behavior: the company is being brutally realistic about prospects for  some well-known products, which is surely smarter than trying to continue being all things to all people forever. But I do think that the end of these brands is part of a larger trend that’s still nascent: The start of the end of shrinkwrapped software.

Money, Encarta, and Flight Simulator all flourished in the era when doing stuff with PCs nearly always involved going to a store, buying a box with one or more discs inside it, and installing software on a hard drive. The shrinkwrapped-box part of that process already feels archaic; software remains relevant, but it’s hard to imagine any future except one in which traditional applications largely give way to Web-based services (and application/service hybrids) over the next few years.

Of course, the rise in Web apps doesn’t automatically spell doom for successful desktop software: Money, Encarta, and Flight Simulator could have theoretically kept on going in largely or completely Web-based form. But it would have been a tricky leap. In a way, it reminds me of what happened in the early 1990s, when Windows began to catch on. Over the next decade, most of the best-known applications of the DOS era–hits like Lotus 1-2-3, Harvard Graphics, dBASE, and many others—failed to be anywhere near as successful in Windows as they’d been in DOS. They didn’t always go away completely, but they were rendered irrelevant.

(Intuit’s Quicken, an application which managed to triumph over Money despite Microsoft’s best efforts, is going a far better job of reinventing itself for the road ahead–but it too is going to find the transition hugely challenging.)

You gotta think that many, many other notable applications–and not just Microsoft ones–will join Money in the deadpool over the next three to five years…

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Has Microsoft Flight Simulator Been Canceled after 29 Years?

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 23, 2009 at 9:19 am

Microsoft Flight SimulatorReports this morning have it that Microsoft’s venerable Flight Simulator game may be realistically simulating the fate of Pan Am, Eastern, and TWA: Supposedly the Microsoft layoffs announced yesterday include the program’s entire development team, and it’s therefore being discontinued. I hope it’s a false alarm. I’ve never sat inside FS’s cockpit even once, but I feel like it’s been part of my life for almost as long as I’ve been using personal computers (that would be 31 years as of this summer).

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