Microsoft Answers Coder Cries Over New Development Kit

True they still control a huge proportion of the desktop market, but most of that is business desktops. Apple's market share is heavily lopsided towards the high end consumer market. It's similar to their position with the iPhone. They have a minority market share, but its the most valuable part of the market.

For over a decade Microsoft has essentially been able to behave as if they have no competition, while Apple still has a culture of being lean, mean and hungry - plus they now have a hundred billion dollar war chest. I'm glad I'm not working for a competitor of theirs right now. At least

Microsoft does seem to be well aware of the problem, but the question is are they too big and slow to be able to react effectively? In mobile the answer was no. On the desktop they have the advantage of a real and significant market share dominance. It's going to be very interesting to see where things stand in 3 or 4 years time.

That's exactly what the motivation for the "Metro/WinRT" strategy for Windows 8 was in the first place, though - to get more developers writing directly for (new versions of) Windows rather than relying on third-party (or even first-party) runtime layers.

     As for Windows XP support, why would Microsoft
     add in support for an OS they don't really support 
     any more?

Because Windows XP is stable, it works and a lot of companies and people are still using it.

If anything, Microsoft is to be blamed for not providing a compelling reason to upgrade. Windows Vista was awful, while Windows 7 is just a re-branded Vista with a little more polish applied. Which is why at home I still have Windows XP on my desktop.

     It has been 11 years, well almost 12

Windows 7 was released at the end of 2009, while XP was released in Aug 2001. That's 8 years in which people had no real upgrade option. Can you really blame them if they are a little conservative?

     the fact people want to support the outdated OS is like asking 
     Google to start supporting Internet Explorer 6 again

That's not a fair comparison, as downloading Firefox/Chrome is painless, is free, doesn't require a hardware upgrade, normal people can do it by themselves and they don't risk losing their data ... saying that upgrading Windows is painful would be an understatement.

WinRT feels foreign on many fronts.

I'm evaluating Win8 for us, and I compiled few of the examples that MS provided. My absolute first impression was that it's hard to debug these applications:

While there was a time, where few or more files were auto-generated, now there are dozens more. On top of that not one project, but two - one container (dll, your app), the other one - the runner (some small exe).

And then press F11 (debug), and see what happens - you are debugging full screen app (metro), and your debugger is running on the desktop. I don't have two monitors, so it might be better there - but what about people with laptops, or other mobile forms that ARE supposed to be the Windows 8 primary devices?

It seems like Windows 8 is collection of ideas, not very well stringed together. I like the "hooking" of one app to another, but it seems too limited - I was much more expecting docking of apps, even if it had some hard limits, but not only 2 apps side-to-side.

Things might improve, but I doubt many people would do professional software that is entirely for Metro. Once you do that, you are taking away from people the ability to run other apps at the same time on top of them.

For example, I regularly run DeskPins, and then I can pin on a window to stay on top - for example notepad, or something else. Now this is not possible.

The File Open/Search aspect is also strange. One thing that I loved of the Open File Dialog in normal Windows is that I can actually put a real URL from http, and it would download the file somehow, and later I can reopen it. Now this is gone.

The whole direction makes sense for mobile devices, but not for professional tools, unless the tools are modified that much that it won't hurt.

In our game studio, it's typical to see Maya/Motion Builder working together with two or three other tools opened, and often they cooperate - one tool displays data, the other edits it - now how... and why would I want to change this into the Metro way?

Thanks, I now parse it as "Microsoft replies to coder concerns about new development kit".