We see dead projects (Friends)

October 31, 2025

78 min episode · 2 min read

Episode

78 min

Read time

2 min

AI-Generated Summary

Published Dec 25, 2025

Key Takeaways

✓Google's Project Graveyard: Killed by Google catalogs 298 discontinued products including Google Reader (2005-2013), which not only died itself but effectively killed RSS as a mass-market technology, leaving only niche users with alternatives like Feed Bin and Feedly still using RSS feeds today.
✓Meteor JS Trajectory: Raised $31 million across seed and Series B rounds, built full-stack JavaScript framework with thousands of community packages, but parent company MDG pivoted to Apollo GraphQL in 2019, selling Meteor assets to Tiny Capital for maintenance mode rather than continued growth and innovation.
✓RethinkDB Market Failure: Founder Slava Akhmechet identified two fatal mistakes: choosing the wrong market and optimizing for correctness, simplicity, and consistency instead of what customers actually valued. Company declared bankruptcy in 2016, unable to compete against MongoDB's dominant NoSQL market position and adoption.
✓Sass Preprocessor Evolution: LibSass reached official end-of-life October 2024 after five years of deprecation. Originally created to add variables and nesting to CSS, Sass successfully pushed features into native CSS itself, making the preprocessor obsolete as modern CSS now includes these capabilities built-in.
✓Quicksilver's First-Mover Disadvantage: Released 2003 as Mac app launcher with extensibility and combinability features, remained in beta for ten years. Apple absorbed core functionality into Spotlight while competitors like Launch Bar, Alfred, and Raycast captured users, demonstrating innovation leadership doesn't guarantee market success.

What It Covers

The hosts explore defunct software projects including Google Reader, Meteor JS, RethinkDB, Quicksilver, and Sass, examining why popular open source and venture-backed projects fail through market competition, poor timing, and strategic missteps.

Key Questions Answered

•Google's Project Graveyard: Killed by Google catalogs 298 discontinued products including Google Reader (2005-2013), which not only died itself but effectively killed RSS as a mass-market technology, leaving only niche users with alternatives like Feed Bin and Feedly still using RSS feeds today.
•Meteor JS Trajectory: Raised $31 million across seed and Series B rounds, built full-stack JavaScript framework with thousands of community packages, but parent company MDG pivoted to Apollo GraphQL in 2019, selling Meteor assets to Tiny Capital for maintenance mode rather than continued growth and innovation.
•RethinkDB Market Failure: Founder Slava Akhmechet identified two fatal mistakes: choosing the wrong market and optimizing for correctness, simplicity, and consistency instead of what customers actually valued. Company declared bankruptcy in 2016, unable to compete against MongoDB's dominant NoSQL market position and adoption.
•Sass Preprocessor Evolution: LibSass reached official end-of-life October 2024 after five years of deprecation. Originally created to add variables and nesting to CSS, Sass successfully pushed features into native CSS itself, making the preprocessor obsolete as modern CSS now includes these capabilities built-in.
•Quicksilver's First-Mover Disadvantage: Released 2003 as Mac app launcher with extensibility and combinability features, remained in beta for ten years. Apple absorbed core functionality into Spotlight while competitors like Launch Bar, Alfred, and Raycast captured users, demonstrating innovation leadership doesn't guarantee market success.

Notable Moment

The hosts recorded forty-eight minutes of content before realizing they never pressed the record button, losing all discussion including detailed Quicksilver analysis. They suggest Riverside should alert users when conversations occur without recording active, similar to how smartwatches prompt about workouts.

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