111–120 of 604 posts
The UI strategy of the future may very well be HTML. It's widespread, standardized, sufficiently performant, and pretty rich. What's still missing is deeper integration with native OS concepts and programming languages other than JS. Frameworks like Electron are a step in that direction but they come with notable drawbacks. Applications often struggle with things that should feel natural like managing multiple OS-lev…
The UI strategy of the future may very well be HTML. It's widespread, standardized, sufficiently performant, and pretty rich. What's still missing is deeper integration with native OS concepts and programming languages other than JS. Frameworks like Electron are a step in that direction but they come with notable drawbacks. Applications often struggle with things that should feel natural like managing multiple OS-lev…
I've been hearing that for 10+ years. This is not going to happen.
The UI strategy of the future may very well be HTML. It's widespread, standardized, sufficiently performant, and pretty rich. What's still missing is deeper integration with native OS concepts and programming languages other than JS. Frameworks like Electron are a step in that direction but they come with notable drawbacks. Applications often struggle with things that should feel natural like managing multiple OS-lev…
Orders of magnitude more BS, plumbing, awkwardness, head scratching, etc.
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…
IMO Microsoft's best long-lived products have always been both finished solutions to your problems and platforms to help you develop more solutions, and Microsoft leadership has always recognized this. Examples: Windows. Office. Dynamics (their Salesforce competitor).
But even if a product doesn't meet that "why not both?" ideal, there is always going to be room for it at Microsoft, as long as it is not only a good or at least mediocre product by itself, but also works to sell you on the whole Microsoft ecosystem. Sometimes that is a bad thing (see all the Windows adware for Bing, Copilot, and M365). But that at least is where Microsoft remains consistent.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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…
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 pr…
The UI strategy of the future may very well be HTML. It's widespread, standardized, sufficiently performant, and pretty rich. What's still missing is deeper integration with native OS concepts and programming languages other than JS. Frameworks like Electron are a step in that direction but they come with notable drawbacks. Applications often struggle with things that should feel natural like managing multiple OS-lev…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
WinRT was technologically terrible (which immediately flows from "no one at Microsoft was actually using it to make anything useful"). But that wasn't even what sunk it - the whole requirements around "of course your WinRT app is going to be in the Microsoft Store^TM its the future" did that. The fucking store is a joke, and those requirements existed solely to boost a bunch of idiots internal careers.
The Windows Store thing was so terrible that I would argue the only good thing that came out of it was that it made Valve/Steam invest in Linux. I still don't understand why the windows store search sucked so badly. It isn't like they had billions of apps. So why did it suck?
The UI strategy of the future may very well be HTML. It's widespread, standardized, sufficiently performant, and pretty rich. What's still missing is deeper integration with native OS concepts and programming languages other than JS. Frameworks like Electron are a step in that direction but they come with notable drawbacks. Applications often struggle with things that should feel natural like managing multiple OS-lev…
not exactly the same, but worth noting that in a spectacular display of being too early, microsoft shipped this 30 years ago (active desktop in 1997 merged the windows explorer with internet explorer, turning folders into web pages).
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.