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Microsoft knows Windows is obsolete. a sneak peek at its replacement

zdnet.com

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Re: Microsoft knows Windows is obsolete. a sneak peek at its replacement

#11

Post by JohnDeHope »

Is there a list of apps that are missing from the Windows Store that cause friction for Windows S? I see it often called a chicken and egg problem. But I never see anyone suggest a list of what they think the eggs are.

(I don't think the problem is missing apps. My guess is that most UWP apps in the Windows Store use a tablet-ey, metro, modern ui, and nobody seems to like it much.)

Re: Microsoft knows Windows is obsolete. a sneak peek at its replacement

#12

Post by zzbzq »

The argument doesn't seem that cogent. The strategy described is what they already tried to do with the Surface RT, a failure which the article briefly mentions and moves on.

Nonetheless, there's a truth here about UWP. Applications today are all HTML websites. They should be containerized native applications, navigated spontaneously like the web, but running native code protected by the privilege declarations system familiar to phone apps. In fact, the "web of apps" is long overdue, but it's been held back by two major players: Apple, whose Appstore discouraged inter-connected-ness by encouraging a micropayment model, while also promoting platform exclusivity; and Google, who pumps billions of dollars into browsers and other web tech propping up the antiquated HTML-based web.

A new system is overdue. UWP is not that system though, it's a straight-up copycat of Apple's app store ecosystem, nothing more.

Re: Microsoft knows Windows is obsolete. a sneak peek at its replacement

#13

Post by zzbzq »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

One problem with that thesis: Metro is built on top of Win32.

Not really true. They built a new OS-level api called winrt. It includes a subset of win32. However, other parts of it are completely new and do not "call into win32" the way, say, .NET on Windows generally does.

Re: Microsoft knows Windows is obsolete. a sneak peek at its replacement

#14

Post by casca »

TL;DR: Microsoft has introduced a new version of Windows 10 called "Windows 10 S"[1]. The big differences are that you can only install apps from the Windows Store and you can't join an on-premise domain. This walled garden approach is designed to "enhance securrty" and kill off Win32 with the convenient side-effect of allowing Microsoft to block apps from competing vendors, so you'll use Edge and not Chrome.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-s

Re: Microsoft knows Windows is obsolete. a sneak peek at its replacement

#15

Post by flohofwoe »

The article paints UWP as a modern programming environment, superior to Win32, that only 'lazy developers' would reject, when in reality it is a confusing mess of desktop and outdated mobile paradigms from 10 years ago when mobile devices had dramatically less RAM and were much less powerful then 'real computers'.

UWP is in many ways worse than Win32, it requires much more boilerplate code to get stuff done, and requires a proprietary dialect of C++ which is not quite compatible with standard C++ (good luck trying to compile most existing C/C++ code on UWP, it's even worse than the Objective-C situation on OSX/iOS).

The baffling fact that UWP manages to be even more complex and less pleasant to write code for then Win32 (which was also a pretty bad API to begin with), coupled with the suicidal closing-down of an once open platform is what really concerns me about the future of Windows. That's not how you win back the hearts and minds of developers.

Re: Microsoft knows Windows is obsolete. a sneak peek at its replacement

#16

Post by pjmlp »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #4

"Some of it is developer laziness. It's not like they haven't had 15 years to learn and adopt .NET and the past five years to adopt Metro/Modern/UWP." Once I can't target Win32 anymore I'll switch to the browser. Metro/Modern/UWP isn't on my radar. I doubt I'm alone in those thoughts.

Not everyone enjoys doing web development, personally every web project I take part on feels like being in the galleys.

Re: Microsoft knows Windows is obsolete. a sneak peek at its replacement

#17

Post by pjmlp »

jbb67 wrote: post #7

UWP is a locked lock, annoying, walled garden that nobody wants to write programs for, Nobody wants to write programs for it, and the only people who run UWP programs are those who either have no choice or do so by mistake. If we can't run WIN32 or freely write win32 programs then windows is dead.

Yeah sure, it is the year of something on desktop.

Legacy Win32 applications can be packaged as UWP ones.

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