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Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

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

#81

Post by int_19h »

rbanffy wrote: post #64
calvinmorrison wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the same time VB still works and runs, so they don't always rug pull.

They might have forgotten to pull that rug.

Definitely not, since it actually takes quite a lot of red tape to ship something as ancient as MSVBVM60.DLL in Windows 30 years later, and guarantee that it is still working.

It's just that it's a piece of tech from back when Microsoft corporate dominance on the desktop was at its peak, and many large companies bought into the then-current tech stack, including VB6. So now Microsoft is stuck maintaining it because those are the customers that bring consistent revenue.

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

#82

Post by gdhkgdhkvff »

drob518 wrote: post #73
rbanffy wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nadella took the reins in 2014 and the stock has 10x’d since then. In the same timeframe, the sp500 has 2.5x’d. Sounds pretty successful to me?

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

#83

Post by GeekyBear »

segphault wrote: post #62

It's bad enough that Microsoft doesn't have a satisfying answer to this question, but what makes it worse is that WinUI feels weirdly non-native in ways that sort of uncomfortably result in Electron apps feeling more like real Windows applications. It's worth noting though that Apple is on a similar trajectory and is now in a very nearly as bad position given all the serious issues with SwiftUI and how badly it has f…

> It's worth noting though that Apple is on a similar trajectory and is now in a very nearly as bad position given all the serious issues with SwiftUI and how badly it has fragmented/degraded Mac desktop application development.

Apple (and Next before it) have been iterating on Appkit/UIKit for three and a half decades.

Now they have added SwiftUI as a second option and have been iterating on it for a bit over half a decade.

This is in no way similar to Microsoft creating and abandoning another UI framework every couple of years.

If Microsoft had been steadily improving Win32 all these years, where would it be today?

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

#84

Post by pdonis »

rbanffy wrote: post #61
lenkite wrote: 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…

MS has never been a software platform company. That's the fundamental reason behind the issue the article talks about.

MS has always been a software application company. Windows was never anything more than a way to sell MS applications--and Windows 3.0 and later wouldn't even have existed in the first place if IBM hadn't dawdled so long over OS/2. Even in the MS-DOS days, when MS was reaping the benefits of IBM's previous bonehead decision to hand the PC OS market to them, MS was selling Office applications--on the Macintosh.

The basic Windows API, in all of its many incarnations, has always been a second-class citizen; MS Office applications have always done their own things that other Windows applications couldn't do without using undocumented features that MS could change at any time (and often did). One could argue that the only reason MS even allowed third-party Windows developers to exist was so that they would, in the words of one of PG's essays, do market research for MS. When a third-party dev came up with something that got enough traction, MS would simply incorporate it into their apps.

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

#85

Post by markus_zhang »

dang wrote: post #47
markus_zhang wrote: post #5

Steven Sinofsky wrote this piece a couple of weeks ago about the same topic: https://x.com/stevesi/status/2036921223150440542

Since that article is a response to this one, we'll add a link to it in the toptext above. Thanks!

Thank you!

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

#87

Post by ack_complete »

hyperrail wrote: post #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…

The most offensive part of the Sinofsky response is this part:

> WinRT (2012) - it (or the embodiment in Windows 8) failed in the market but it also showed both the problem and potential solution to building for new markets while respecting the past

I can't express how wrong this is. WinRT was the most destructive thing that the Windows team ever did to the OS. It drove a hard stake into Windows, splitting it in half and declaring that anything previous to Windows 8, oriented toward desktop, or using primary input through mouse and keyboard over touch was dead. Microsoft basically told all existing Windows developers that if they weren't building a new, touch-oriented, mobile-style app specifically for Windows 8, they didn't matter and wouldn't get any support whatsoever, which is exactly what happened every time they broke existing desktop functionality. Calling this "respecting the past" is a crass insult and taking no responsibility for damaging the Windows development experience and accelerating development away from native Windows apps.

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

#88

Post by int_19h »

markus_zhang wrote: post #5

Steven Sinofsky wrote this piece a couple of weeks ago about the same topic: https://x.com/stevesi/status/2036921223150440542

It's very amusing to see Sinofsky of all people all but dumping on .NET and (still?!) not understanding why developers so proactively jumped ship from Win32 & MFC hell to WinForms. Or why the HTML/JS app model in Win8 never really took off.

I was in DevDiv during his great WinRT push and the overall feeling I remember was that the guys in Windows had zero clue as to what the devs actually wanted, but were hell bent on scorching all the ground that wasn't theirs. My team actually did some prototyping for Python/WinRT support, and we had it working to the point of the visual WPF designer in Visual Studio even. Unlike JS, it was full fledged - you could use anything in WinRT same as C#, extend classes etc, while JS limited you to a "consumer" surface of the API. That prototype was killed because Windows (i.e. at the time = Sinofsky) said they didn't think developers cared about anything but JS so they didn't need another high level language.

It was also when Windows was aggressively pushing their Metro styling on everything in the company, sometimes to ridiculous lengths - e.g. Visual Studio at the time "aligned" with Metro by, I kid you not, making the main menu bar ALL UPPER CASE so that it looked like Metro tabs! You can still see the blog posts announcing this "feature" when it shipped in the first public beta of VS 2012, and the comments on them.

And then there was Windows RT (not to be confused with WinRT, because Microsoft product naming!). Aka the Windows-on-ARM that ditched decades of backwards compatibility because Sinofsky decided that rebooting the ecosystem is the only way to compete with iPad or whatever. What actually happened was that the users went WTF because none of their native apps - which, contrary to his take, were very much alive and kicking! - worked there, and devs went WTF because they were told that they'd need to rewrite everything yet again in some new thing that was kinda sorta but not quite like WPF, because Windows just hated .NET that much and couldn't accept that the devs liked it over their stuff. So the app store was a barren waste, and without apps there would be no users.

Some of the technical details in there are plain wrong, too. For instance, .NET 3.0 actually shipped in Vista, contrary to his claim that it was shipped in Win7 (and that it was the first time .NET shipped in consumer Windows - in fact, that would be .NET 1.1 shipping in WinXP SP1).

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

#89

Post by barrkel »

Windows frameworks got web envy.

Xaml and styling and all sorts to try and compete.

Trouble is, it made desktop development harder, and it didn't win against the web. It left the simple and safe formula of standard and common controls for a designer's playground, but the designers preferred the web. And if you make something for the web, you can package it in Electron and get cross platform cheaply.

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

#90

Post by Krssst »

mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #79
mapontosevenths wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The end state of genAI could as well be a few billionaires being their enterprise and everybody else being unemployed or working at the factory. Robots are not there yet (far from it) and someone needs to build and maintain the thing as well as food for everyone. High unemployment could drive salaries down and make lots of thing unavailable to the common people while making humans cheaper than automation for boring manual work.

That's an extreme scenario but today's politicians are not very keen into redistribution of wealth or prevention of excessive accumulation of economic power leading to exceeding the power of the state itself. I see nothing preventing that scenario from happening.

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