I wish I could find a luxury theater like that around here. The closest I can find will serve you at the bar, and then shoo you into your movie at the appointed time. They won't blink if you carry your alcoholic beverage into the auditorium, but they certainly won't refill it for you inside.

This is just like going to the "talkies" and realizing your favorite silent movie actor has a squeaky voice and completely ruins the picture. We're just trying to plaster 2D video games into 3D systems and hoping it works out alright, instead of building games from the ground up for VR.

I'm sure it wasn't also the sticky floors, the screaming children or the guy in the seat ahead of your turning on his phone so he could check his text messages and destroy your low-light vision, right?

This guy gets it.

Ironically, I'd argue that since Schmidt left, Google's products have only gotten worse. Gmail was redesigned, and started hiding features rather than adding them. Labs was killed, mostly across the board (it still struggles on in Music, but for who knows how long?). Maps was redesigned once, twice, each time removing more of the interface and increasing the CPU/RAM utilization of hardware. Google, who used to be known for products made by (and for) power users, became a company focused on design and the democratization of the interface. Their latest introduction to Project Fi has basically completed the transformation, with Google's introductory trailer claiming that the service "just works," echoing Apple's famous adage from years ago.

That's a fair response. I can agree with the merit of your suggestion, Office 2003 is basically the same product and is moderately comparable in modern times. It doesn't have the OOXML formatted files that its successor used, but most modern systems can read the binary .doc and its siblings to a fair degree. It shares the advantage of most desktop applications in that its interface can remain literally unchanged from the day it was installed, for good or bad.

I think I'd argue that some of your current iteration examples are a bit hard to compare to those that Google shut down. Apart from shopping and 411, which have easy and popular alternatives in Amazon, eBay, and local 411 telephone services, all the rest are pretty much services that only have context on the Internet. It's difficult to compare a venerable service like retail (Amazon, eBay) to Wave, which was an experiment in combining IMs, email and Google Docs. It's certainly easy to imagine how a service like Amazon could survive without the Internet, albeit with some hardships, but not as easy to imagine a service like Google Wave. I agree, those services you listed off are still around in their current iterations that mimic their 2005 iterations reasonably well, but they have the advantage of being instantly recognizable and accessible services with direct offline analogues, something that Google Wave, iGoogle and the others didn't have.

Getting back to Office 2003, I have to point out that many of the big tech companies are even moving away from that format of desktop application. Microsoft, Apple, and of course Google, have been releasing services (Microsoft 365, iWork with iCloud, etc) that blur the line between desktop and web applications. More companies, such as Adobe, Autodesk and other industrial products are moving in this direction as well, taking their software into the cloud and offering it on a subscription basis. These products will be just as subject to the whims of their creator as was Google Wave, as fleeting as iGoogle, and able to be redesigned, restructured, have its features removed or reorganized or replaced, and possibly shut down, all on the whim of the company. Subscribers have no ownership in this situation, and are just as beholden to the goodness of the company they subscribe from to maintain the product. Even with contracts and money flowing, a business could easily decide to shutter a product line in favor of something else, especially those with broader categories of applications (e.g. Microsoft, Adobe and Google). I would propose that we haven't seen the last of shuttered services like these, and the next time it happens it will be far more shocking than Google Reader ever was.

Everything is popular and useful to someone. I didn't use any of those products heavily before they were killed, and their death didn't bother me at all. I used Windows Live Messenger heavily before Microsoft killed it, and the experience on Skype is far worse, but Microsoft isn't the worst company in the world to me. Businesses do what is best for business, and if there's a need, they fill it.

Most every tech company has that problem. Show me a product from 10 years ago that is still around, and popular, in essentially the same form.

Sure, in the same way that Apple bought Siri. They didn't just use the product as is, but continued to develop it for their own needs.

Usually the news is less about the federal regulator doing her/his job, but the decision being made.

Star Wars?! Oh, man, there are so many better examples of Disney rehashing old works. How about Maleficent (aka Sleeping Beauty from the villain's perspective)? Or running the Disney Princess angle into the ground with Brave (at least other Princess films had a legend or fairy tale background, Brave was just a complete fabrication)? Better yet, let's just talk about Disney Princess films, and how Disney takes an old legend or fairy tale, and turns it into a highly profitable film and merchandising effort? If that's not rehashing the same shit over and over, I don't know what is. The recent Star Wars acquisition doesn't have anything on the black hole of creativity that is Disney.

On the other hand, works in the public domain allow multiple interested parties to rescue old films to update their medium, rather than relying on the generosity of a copyright holder. If a copyright holder believes there is no money to be made, why would they invest the time in updating the medium? Whereas a non-copyright holder, yet an interested party, may have archival or just plain altruistic motives for doing so?

It's also possible that the copyright holder does not have the financial means to update, publish, market and otherwise finance a restoration of the work, while another for-profit company might. While under copyright, such a company might simply buy a license, but there can be legal loopholes and financial obstacles in the way of this (such as if the copyright holder simply does not want to sell, or believes they deserve a higher cut than is reasonable). A public domain work has none of these problems. The only real issue would be getting hold of a copy of the film in good enough condition to work on and reproduce.

18% is not unusual, it's a minority.

Are contracts valid once you're dead?

You mean the shopping service that nobody uses? I've tried before, I've never found a legitimate retailer on their search engine.