OpenAI now gets to decide which type of product assassin it will become
AWS, Google, Broadcom, or Netscape?
OpenAI on Wednesday announced the death of its controversial Sora video creation tool, just two days after publishing a guide on how to use it well.
Like so many AI products, Sora was capable of creating revolting content and blatant copyright abuse. OpenAI tidied up those messes and then signed a deal with Disney that saw the House of Mouse promise to inject $1 billion into the AI upstart and explore using its tools.
On Monday, OpenAI was still promoting safe use of Sora on its website. On Tuesday it used a less visible channel, an X post, to announce “We’re saying goodbye to the Sora app ... We’ll share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on preserving your work.”
Disney then bailed on its deal.
Thus endeth OpenAI’s video generation efforts, for now at least.
The death of Sora follows last week’s Wall Street Journal report that OpenAI intends to refocus on business users.
It’s also OpenAI’s second recent rapid reversal, after the January decision to deprecate the GPT-4o model just nine months after releasing it, and with just two weeks’ notice.
Technology buyers know that their suppliers sometimes kill products.
Google has often been cast as a product-slaying villain, even prompting the creation of killedbygoogle.com to mourn its murderous ways.
The Chocolate Factory sometimes kills products because they’re just bad and nobody uses them – hello, Wave – but on other occasions just decides they’re not needed any more, as was the case with the basic HTML version of Gmail. On at least one other occasion Google killed a product because it wanted users to start paying for it. In that case, users angrily pointed out that Google had promised the legacy version of its Workplace suite would always be free, and reversed its decision.
Overall, however, Google has not often disrupted its business customers.
AWS has been more inconvenient, launching multiple overlapping products and sometimes killing the least popular.
Users of deprecated Google and AWS products face inconvenience, but generally get fair warning and have alternatives.
Broadcom, and its spiritual sibling Cloud Software Group, offers a muddier example of product death strategies, by keeping software alive but only offering it in bundles –completely changing the way it is sold and telling users they’ll be better off this way. Atlassian has made the same argument when killing on-prem products.
And then there was Netscape, which in its late 1990s rush to dominate the twin markets for enterprise-grade web infrastructure software and consumer browsers created a fog of vaporware and got lost trying to bring it all to market. The company infamously announced products and changed strategy before it could finish them, in the process creating a codebase so convoluted it had to rewrite its core offerings. Trying to do so left it dead in the water as rivals, especially Microsoft, surged ahead.
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Netscape offers a warning to OpenAI. The company’s leadership was arguably more experienced and accomplished than the AI upstart’s, and it faced only one direct foe rather than the flotilla of AI aspirants in today’s global software market. The company still struggled to build a disciplined engineering organization, never managed to overcome Microsoft’s ability to block its access to users, and eventually collapsed under the weight of its own ambitions.
OpenAI has its own problems with Redmond, which is both a collaborator and a competitor. The AI pioneer has also spread itself thin, into the Stargate datacenter project, making OpenClaw fit for mass consumption, brain-computer interfaces, and maybe even consumer hardware.
The demise of Sora shows OpenAI’s leadership knows they must become product-killers, and that they are currently happy to leave a bloody mess behind them by failing to provide a plan for the future of users’ content – while also losing one of the biggest-name customers on the planet. ®
