Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

jsnover.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 604 posts

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

#121

Post by garganzol »

lazide wrote: post #113
garganzol wrote: post #110

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…

HTML and CSS are also absurdly hard to actually do anything useful with or interactive compared to normal desktop or app frameworks. Orders of magnitude more BS, plumbing, awkwardness, head scratching, etc.

That was indeed a pain point, but not anymore after CSS flex layout became available some 10 years ago. It's not worse than WPF for sure. It's even better than WPF because you have access to tons of UI components and toolkits that work everywhere.

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

#122

Post by gdhkgdhkvff »

drob518 wrote: post #115
gdhkgdhkvff wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In a bubble, everyone looks like they’re doing well. Don’t confuse that with an actual strategy.

But I compared it to sp500. Even QQQ only 6x’d in that timeframe.

Which bubble are you talking about? Even if you remove everything after January 1 2020, it’s still up 4x since nadella took over. And that follows a decade of stagnation under Balmer.

What numbers do you know of that show that Microsoft hasn’t been successful since nadella took charge?

Complain all you want about the products, but the stock under nadella has been a success.

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

#123

Post by lazide »

garganzol wrote: post #121
lazide wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTML and CSS are also absurdly hard to actually do anything useful with or interactive compared to normal desktop or app frameworks. Orders of magnitude more BS, plumbing, awkwardness, head scratching, etc.

That was indeed a pain point, but not anymore after CSS flex layout became available some 10 years ago. It's not worse than WPF for sure. It's even better than WPF because you have access to tons of UI components and toolkits that work everywhere.

Uh huh.

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

#124

Post by bigstrat2003 »

gdhkgdhkvff wrote: post #82
drob518 wrote: post #73

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?

Stock price going up is not the success criterion for a business. Making money is. And Microsoft's decisions are undermining their ability to make money in the future, which makes them bad decisions even if the stock price has gone up or if they make more money in the short term.

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

#125

Post by garganzol »

stefan_ wrote: post #101
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.

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.

My favorite example of that was when WinRT app .exe files could not be launched from the command line. Only via some Windows Store voodoo dance with approvals, signatures and "security" that made WinRT for developers essentially a dead-on-arrival technology.

I would not be surprised if you still cannot launch a fricking .exe.

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

#126

Post by bigstrat2003 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

The churn would have been much worse if Microsoft was rolling out successful GUI framework after GUI framework. As it is you can still write a Win32 app if that pleases you, or still write .NET (and damn that runtime download!) Microsoft has bought into ‘make a web app’ since 1988, they introduced AJAX, they got flexbox and grid into CSS and numerous HTML 5 features to support application UIs. They ‘frikin bought npm…

> For all the complaints about modern JavaScript it gives you the pieces to make a very pleasant world in terms of DX and UX

There is no such thing as pleasant UX in a web app. The best experience will always be a native app, a web app is at best a port in a storm solution.

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

#127

Post by bigstrat2003 »

judah wrote: post #63
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

The churn would have been much worse if Microsoft was rolling out successful GUI framework after GUI framework. As it is you can still write a Win32 app if that pleases you, or still write .NET (and damn that runtime download!) Microsoft has bought into ‘make a web app’ since 1988, they introduced AJAX, they got flexbox and grid into CSS and numerous HTML 5 features to support application UIs. They ‘frikin bought npm…

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…

> 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?

There are other options besides "web app" and "only one OS". A cross platform app which uses something like GTK or QT will be a massively better experience for your users, one a web app cannot hope to equal.

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

#128

Post by pragmatic »

binarymax wrote: post #6

Given how bad windows has become since windows 7, I’ve been wondering. Does Bill Gates still use Windows? Does he put up with the horribleness?

The guy getting std’s from Russian girls who Warren Buffet doesn’t talk to anymore.

That Bill Gates?

Seems he might have other priorities these days?

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

#129

Post by mwcampbell »

> WPF was good

As someone who saw what impact WPF had on average users running average hardware in the late 2000s to early 2010s, I disagree.

In 2011, my brother was in seminary, using an average Windows Vista-era laptop that he had been given in 2008. When he was home for Christmas in 2011, we were talking about his laptop, and he told me that the Logos Bible software ran sluggishly on that laptop. He said something about how, for reasons unknown to him, the current version of Logos required advanced graphics capabilities (I forget exactly how he phrased it, but he had learned that the slowness had something to do with graphics). Bear in mind, this is software that basically just displays text, presumably with some editing for adding notes and such. At the time, I just bought him another laptop.

A few years later, I happened to read that Logos version 4 was built on WPF. Then, remembering my brother, I found this Logos forum thread:

https://community.logos.com/discussion/6200

This shows that Logos users were discussing the performance of Logos on machines with different graphics hardware. For a program that was all about displaying and editing text, it shouldn't have mattered. WPF had made a bet on then-advanced graphics hardware for reasonable performance, and that was bad for these users. And that's just the one example I know about.

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

#130

Post by jiggawatts »

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…

“Retired general criticises the Pentagon” is practically a trope.
Post reply on HN