A product that is being cancelled is being “sunsetted.” The word was chosen for its image: a gentle, natural, inevitable ending, a warm sky, nobody’s fault. The product simply reached the end of its day.

But a product does not set. Someone decides to stop it, and the people who depended on it have to find something else. “Sunset” deletes the decider from the sentence. It also deletes the users, who are not pictured in the sunset; they are somewhere off-frame, reading the email.

The tech dialect is rich in these. “Deprecated” for abandoned. “Pivot” for the first idea failed. “Offboarding” for firing. “Reduced headcount” for the same. Mamet’s complaint about the theatre of his day was that audiences had been trained to accept garbage as long as it was presented confidently. The product announcement is the same genre: “We’re excited to share that we’re sunsetting…” is a sentence that nobody has ever meant.