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How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

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Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#11

Post by smacktoward »

ape4 wrote: post #5

I just don't get why they did that.

As was the case with the old Soviet Union, Microsoft decisions frequently only make sense when viewed through the lens of internal politics -- of one apparatchik trying to stick a knife in the back of another, in order to increase their own power.

My guess on this one: the new Metro-style app platform was the work of Sinofsky's Windows Division, while traditional XAML app tooling belonged to some other division. In such a scenario, if XAML could be deprecated and Metro-style apps made the One Way to develop apps on Windows, it would mean that a big slice of Microsoft's business that had previously belonged to some other exec would now belong to Sinofsky.

(A turf war, in other words.)

If the idea of a Microsoft executive being willing to pursue a course that would hurt Microsoft just to increase his own power seems unrealistic, I would refer you to the Iron Law of Institutions (http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/001705.html):

The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution "fail" while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to "succeed" if that requires them to lose power within the institution.

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#13

Post by stephengillie »

Delmania wrote: post #7
tostitos1979 wrote: post #6

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…

> P.S. I never got into ASP/ASP.net ... is that what people use .net for most these days? For web development, yes. MS's REST framework is called WebAPI, and most people pair that with Angular, but you can use your poison of choice. If you want a more traditional MVC framework, there's MVC. If you want be all hip and cool, you can deploy a web api container to one Ubuntu machine, and the your frontend to another.

A lot of people do use .NET through ASP. Personally, I use it through Powershell, loading libraries and invoking functions in scripts or the command line. I've put together a couple server applications in it, and a voice recognition application too.

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#14

Post by AKrumbach »

yread wrote: post #8
speeder wrote: post #2

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 iP…

> 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...

According to the chart on that site, Windows 7 is still at 44%.

That very much sounds like "not being able to overcome past Windows versions in market share" to me.

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#15

Post by FussyZeus »

Bartweiss wrote: post #9
FussyZeus wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Somehow all of the remastered Ages games ended up running on it. They'll happily choke computers that can handle the latest-and-greatest FPS, just because most of their cycles are being spent on god knows what.

I admit this is my side computer, it's far from the latest and greatest (that's the other one on my desk, heh) I don't use it for a ton other than playing longer strategy games while relaxing in my home office, but I was shocked when a game from 1999 actually managed to overheat it.

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#16

Post by smithkl42 »

Bob Muglia did something similar with Silverlight back in 2010. As I'd invested two years of my life into a Silverlight-based startup at that point, it effectively killed two years' worth of work, and left me rather soured on Microsoft.

http://blog.wouldbetheologian.com/2010/11/its-about-trust-mu...

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#18

Post by pjmlp »

smacktoward wrote: post #11
ape4 wrote: post #5

I just don't get why they did that.

As was the case with the old Soviet Union, Microsoft decisions frequently only make sense when viewed through the lens of internal politics -- of one apparatchik trying to stick a knife in the back of another, in order to increase their own power. My guess on this one: the new Metro-style app platform was the work of Sinofsky's Windows Division, while traditional XAML app tooling belonged to some other division. In s…

It is also a reason why Longhorn kind of failed.

Windows division wasn't happy seeing the new .NET guys getting all the focus and I bet most of the issues weren't technical challenges that couldn't be solved, rather political between divisions.

After all, history of computing has enough examples of OSes being done in memory safe languages.

I also bet it is no coincidence that WinRT model isn't nothing more that the COM+ Runtime brought back from the ashes, using .NET metadata instead of COM type libraries.

This is what .NET was supposed to be like, before Microsoft decided to go with the CLR approach instead.

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#19

Post by obsurveyor »

AKrumbach wrote: post #14
yread wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

According to the chart on that site, Windows 7 is still at 44%. That very much sounds like "not being able to overcome past Windows versions in market share" to me.

Nope. Look at the graphs for Windows 7 and Windows 10(assuming that's the dotted line) over the whole recorded time starting in 2008. Windows 10 is roughly following Windows 7's trajectory, if not exceeding it a little bit. It took Windows 7 over two years to initially reach 44%. Windows 10 has been out for only about a year now.

Re: How one announcement damaged the .NET ecosystem on Windows

#20

Post by pjmlp »

jbandela1 wrote: post #12

When see stuff like this I think of Joel Spolsky's post http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html This I think was the beginning of the downfall of Windows as the controlling force in personal computing.

If that is the downfall of Windows, then it is also the downfall of Apple and Google development tools and OSe as they also have their share of "API of the year", deprecations or just plain removal without way forward.
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