How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

Microsoft is just that good in "Orborning" themselves.

(also "Ratnering" too, and saw some people here in HN creating the name "Elop effect" that is when you do a "Osborne" and a "Ratner" in the same announcement).

Some examples:

1. That Memo "Symbian is dead", when in the third world Symbian was crushing the iPhone like a hydraulic press, due to its sheer utility/price performance (ie: being almost useful was the iPhone was, for much lower price, this is including all the informal dev ecosystem). In Brazil Symbian had 68% of the market share... in the end of that year it was zero, and chinese OEMs instead took over the market selling unbranded Android phones. Nokia now in Brazil is a unknown brand, some people recognize chinese OEM factories and don't recognize Nokia.

2. Microsoft repeat killings, and unkillings of their game APIs, for example they removed DirectDraw from Vista, noticed part of the sales stall was direct result of that, and put it back (in emulation form), still, this was enough to make many, many people do their best to not switch from XP, and introduced in gamers the notion to not upgrade immediately (also MS notoriously removed in Vista support for 3D Audio Hardware Acceleration, and only added partial support back on Win8, that one killed an entire industry, 3D Audio chip companies went dead left and right, or became zombies, now that 3D Audio is /needed/ for VR to make people not feel sick, it is the GPU companies that are trying to pick up the slack and make hacky workarounds to generate 3D Audio using the video API to go around Microsoft).

3. Sort of part of point 2, but MS killing XNA out of the blue, the intention of XNA was to be a Xbox 360 dev API that you could also use in Windows, they killed XNA before announcing Xbox One, and now are advertising Windows Universal Platform for Xbox One with selling points very "XNA-like", but this time you don't see devs rushing to evangelize for MS, instead they are writing opinion pieces on Guardian (EPIC) warning against it, creating their own Linux Distro (Valve) to go around it, and so on. Also it caused a mono gamedev ecosystem to show up, with XNA dead, all the C# devs had to go to mono, making the previously MS-only platform games now become cross-platform (something that is probably bad for MS in the business sense).

4. The "DX12 is Win10 only" thing while Win10 is not being able to overcome past Windows versions in market share, the best outcome for this for the wide public is instead of using DX12 the devs go with Vulkan, something that for MS is obviously bad in the platform clamping-down sense. But probably what will happen is the worst outcome: like in the DX10 for Vista era, devs will just keep staunchingly supporting DX9, like they are still are (even new AAA games with native DX9 support come out sometimes), resulting into a even messier backwards compatibility environment.

That emulation of DirectDraw by the way is trash. Age of Empires II practically redlines my Alienware which can run Sins of a Solar Empire without breaking a sweat.

I used to do quite a bit of Windows development back in the day (started with win32/MFC, moved to winforms). I was wondering the other day why I stopped (to some extent because the modern Microsoft seems to be more hip with Linux support, containers, etc.). My guess was that things started getting wonky around the time LINQ came out. It seemed pretty unnatural to me personally, and it was being pushed hard. The metro apps was also being pushed hard at that time. My reaction was to leave the complexity/instability behind and go to an ecosystem that seemed/was more stable. Web based GUIs along with Python backends. I'm at the point now, where I've shipped a few projects using these tools, and am pretty satisfied for the most part. I do miss C# on some days, and I suspect I'll get a chance to work with it if Microsoft keeps up being hip :)

P.S. I never got into ASP/ASP.net ... is that what people use .net for most these days?

> while Win10 is not being able to overcome past Windows versions in market share

Windows 10 past 20% market share http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-os-ww-monthly-201504-2016...

Sinofsky had a reputation for not working well with anyone outside of his team[1]..Net (including WPF) occurs outside of the Windows team.

[1]: http://allthingsd.com/20121113/in-the-sinofsky-departure-bil...