Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

jsnover.com

71–80 of 604 posts

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#71
post #68

This article smells so strongly of AI that I'd be surprised if the author did much of any writing.

I found the article itself very informative and not particularly ai-tastic. But then I got to that infographic at the end. Holy smokes was that disappointing. It seems clear they didn't even bother to read the captions the AI scribbled.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#72
Both this blog post and the Steven Sinofsky response really set my blood boiling, because they both reek of retired-executive score settling, a kind of blame game that gets played out decades after the fact between ex-high-ranking people in hopes that whoever writes last is able to cement the conventional wisdom.

People who play this corrosive game either refuse to believe that they are at fault for not changing what they were doing at that time or speaking up about what they were observing then, or they know they're at fault and want to deceptively distract us from that fact. Either way, ask yourself this: "Aren't they sorry?" If they're not, just move on.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#73
post #61
post #28

The problem is that they just could not commit to anything for more than 2 years after Win32. They had something reasonably good in WinRT. They should have stuck to that. But Nadella came in, said Azure Cloud is the future and abandoned the Windows platform.

At this point one must ask if Microsoft is still a software platform company - whether their products form a substrate where an ecosystem can form and build a coherent software environment for the users of their platform. Microsoft used to be the Windows company (after being the BASIC company, then the DOS company). Then it became the Office company. Now it’s SharePoint and Office365 and Azure, a utility. Windows is…

Nadella thought he could take the reins and start yelling “Cloud! Cloud! Cloud!” and that would be successful. He doesn’t have a strategy and now that’s becoming apparent.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#74
At Redmond, there was also the Patterns & Practices group (P&P) that tried to make sense of the dev products, and built extra libraries “to show customers how to use them”. They followed the bouncing ball of the frameworks releases from the main development teams. It suggests that it wasn’t clear exactly how you’d use the main products: so P&P said, ‘try it like this.’ I also think the article didn’t say much about MS in the web era. The company survived webdev IMO, but it definitely wasn’t the leader

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#75

There’s a poster on here who keeps posting and re-posting about their dinner with a Microsoft executive and how they were told Microsoft is all-in on enterprise. Waiting for that copy-paste to make its way over here. Microsoft keeps footgunning things so hard I think even enterprise might be reluctant to go with them moving forward [0]. I don’t have Netcraft numbers in front of me but I doubt things have notably impr…

Microsoft was so focused on the enterprise they forgot that enterprises are made up of individual users.

Any trade-off that favors the enterprise in lieu of the user actually benefits nobody in the long term.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#79

There’s a poster on here who keeps posting and re-posting about their dinner with a Microsoft executive and how they were told Microsoft is all-in on enterprise. Waiting for that copy-paste to make its way over here. Microsoft keeps footgunning things so hard I think even enterprise might be reluctant to go with them moving forward [0]. I don’t have Netcraft numbers in front of me but I doubt things have notably impr…

Microsoft was so focused on the enterprise they forgot that enterprises are made up of individual users. Any trade-off that favors the enterprise in lieu of the user actually benefits nobody in the long term.

The end state of genAI is that the end user is the enterprise

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#80
post #66
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post is touching on a key question: why write a Windows-specific app? I'm a developer who has built and published several apps. I want the biggest possible audience for those apps. Why would I limit those apps to Windows? (Or even to any single platform/OS?) Web apps work everywhere. The web has grown increasingly powerful and capable. Why would I invest in a technology that can only run on a single OS? Doesn't…

I used to get hung up on this native vs web thing. But when it comes down to it, it's just one renderer or another unless you're actually drawing the controls yourself pixel by pixel. The sticking point is following the system style / theme. But all the popular desktop OSs seem to have deviated on this so much themselves I'm not sure how important this is.

The DOM is very ill-suited for most UI. Too complex and lots of missing features. It’s a whole bag of unneeded code and the resulting UI doesn’t fit anywhere.
Post reply on HN