Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by andsoitis » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:18 AM UTC

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #124

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?

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.

> Stock price going up is not the success criterion for a business. Making money is.

Microsoft’s net income is up roughly 5.4x from ~$22B in 2014 to $119B today. Profit margin also expanded, from ~25% net margins in 2014 to over 36% today.

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

#132

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:18 AM UTC

[deleted]

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

#133

Post by jimbokun » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:32 AM UTC

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…

That’s the strategy of 20 years ago.

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

#134

Post by tredre3 » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:36 AM UTC

lazide wrote: post #123

garganzol wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you're comparing hand-writing an HTML/CSS interface to the WYSIWYG form editor of Qt or Visual Studio? Because hand writing a GUI in Qt/QML/C++/.NET is not any easier than writing it in HTML. There are tons of boilerplate and special markup to learn. The magical editor just hides all the plumbing from you.

I'll grant you that the lack of good WYSIWYG designers for working on web/electron apps is appalling, it's like RAD peaked in 1998 with VB6 and it's been downhill ever since.

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

#135

Post by eqvinox » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:40 AM UTC

The answer is, clearly, Qt.

(This isn't even a joke. Assuming you're not going Electron.)

Part of the reason here is that it's their main business. They can't afford letting it languish and/or changing direction every 6 months.

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

#136

Post by rincebrain » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:43 AM UTC

mwcampbell wrote: post #129

> 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…

I would argue that was less that WPF was the wrong life choice and more that Microsoft shouldn't have bent the knee to Intel's antitrust push to say their crap hardware was sufficient. [1]

[1] - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/03/the-vista-capable-de...

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

#137

Post by rincebrain » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:51 AM UTC

vachina wrote: post #119

disconcision wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

It is despised for the same reason web based UI is despised today. Firefox OS was also “too early” and failed.

It was more despised for being a gaping security hole than anything else, as I recall - the things you could do with it were really neat demos, but even back then, I said "I am not loading a random website that can access local things every time I log in".

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

#138

Post by psychoslave » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:59 AM UTC

Microsoft itself is a business driven by a consistent strategy of striving for market dominance no matter the means. looking for coherence in the resulting DX is missing the forest for the tree.

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

#139

Post by lazide » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 3:02 AM UTC

tredre3 wrote: post #134

lazide wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh huh.

I think you're comparing hand-writing an HTML/CSS interface to the WYSIWYG form editor of Qt or Visual Studio? Because hand writing a GUI in Qt/QML/C++/.NET is not any easier than writing it in HTML. There are tons of boilerplate and special markup to learn. The magical editor just hides all the plumbing from you. I'll grant you that the lack of good WYSIWYG designers for working on web/electron apps is appalling, it…

Not having to round trip through ACL/security checks.

Not having to deal with state management.

Not having to deal with browser compatibility issues (and mobile vs desktop).

Not having to deal with weird input validation stuff dual layer stuff that is inherent in web apps, but not a big deal elsewhere.

Not having to deal with laggy and unstable connections at the UI layer.

Etc, etc.

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

#140

Post by kmeisthax » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 3:05 AM UTC

coliveira wrote: post #116

pdonis wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This makes sense, because even in the best times Windows was not the biggest money maker for Microsoft, it was Office. So MS was never fully behind Windows, it was only the means to an end, which was selling the most software for enterprises.

Ironically, Office was the original poster child for Microsoft reinventing it's own widget toolkits, even back when Microsoft had a coherent visual design and developer story.