"While not the same, it *is* sortof an equivalent, in that it stopped work in that field for a while, because Google had it nailed. People had stopped building things around RSS, instead using Google Reader's unofficial API (which had sync and other things for free). But there is not really an 'extinguish' part to this story, I guess - RSS is still alive and well, and will probably bound back since the playing field is now wide open. The death of Google Reader is probably a good thing - new feed readers with much more innovative features would turn up, and some already have. So yes, it might be very different from what Microsoft did. But personally, I've never witnessed (or tried to understand) what it was that Microsoft did - and this is the closest I've got so far." - Yuvi