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

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

#551

Post by lynndotpy » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 8:39 PM UTC

furyofantares wrote: post #13

c-c-c-c-c wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that part really didn’t make sense to me. This is true for all desktop platforms.

I agree, although I was talking about: Dead silence. Here's what 3 people said (the opposite of silence). Then the meeting went sideways (also the opposite of silence). The silence is the story. WHAT SILENCE?

In a more generous interpretation, there was silence, _then_ people said something. That makes sense.

But "That silence is the story." is still a pretty telling non-sequitr, and it doesn't seem like the kind that comes from sloppy editing.

The punchy "Thing. Thing. Thing." is used constantly. We see it constantly in this article:

> 852 pages. Win16 API in C.

> Message loops. Window procedures. GDI.

> One OS, one API, one language, one book.

But those are minor sins. But in the end of the article, Snover states that Microsoft pitched C++ in 2012. That's so incorrect! The contents of this blog post are at least partially falsified.

Plus, the thesis statement is nonsense:

> When a platform can’t answer “how should I build a UI?” in under ten seconds, it has failed its developers. Full stop.

"Full stop" is a pretty heavy thing to end a nonsense statement with. How an inanimate software platform can "answer" things is not implicitly obvious, either. Is it a human representative? Are they the docs? Is it through a good UI?

The post is about Petzold's / Reccold's "Programming Windows", but it is apparently 852 pages, so that certainly wasn't answered in under 10 seconds either.

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

#552

Post by WesolyKubeczek » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 8:45 PM UTC

antiframe wrote: post #44

api wrote: post #31

Nobody really has. Apple comes the closest but they keep rug pulling it in weird ways. Windows and Mac in the 90s had very consistent GUIs with such consistency in things like keyboard shortcuts that apps could easily be learned. The term “intuitive” was king in the realm of UI design. Then the web hit and all that died.

Not nobody. KDE has a functional and consistent GUI.

Problem is, both Firefox and Chrome look out of place on it when you use a non-standard color scheme. Custom keyboard shortcuts won't work on Chrome. When you change a theme from light to dark and vice versa, both browsers like to have text in their UI stuck on the wrong color.

I could use Konqueror, I guess, but its ad blocking plugin (and plugins overall) seems to never have progressed much since KDE 2.

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

#553

Post by vovavili » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 8:48 PM UTC

irishcoffee wrote: post #496

vovavili wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience: - Qt Widgets worked fine, but looked like a piece of software made in 2013; - QML looks stylish and is a very nice language, but had a lot of weird bugs. Neither of these are issues I'd run with if I were to make a web app.

Widgets looks like whatever you want them to look like, if the feel like they're from the 2010s its because the implementer made that choice, not because of a limitation in qtwidgets.

Could be, but I am mostly speaking about the fact that making a web app looks stylish feels infinitely easier to me.

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

#554

Post by cyberax » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 8:48 PM UTC

hbn wrote: post #513

ZuLuuuuuu wrote: post #342

2 things Microsoft failed to do in the last 15 years are: 1) They abandoned their mobile phone, tablet, and wearable strategy. So, today if you develop a native Windows application, it will only work on desktops and laptops. That is it. It is not attractive for a developer to learn a whole new UI framework just to target a single form factor. And I don't know if there is any solution for this at this point, they shou…

> They abandoned their mobile phone, tablet, and wearable strategy They were way too late to make a dent. Ballmer made the mistake when the iPhone came out to not get their ass in gear to compete. Microsoft's first potential real competitor to the iPhone came with Windows Phone 7 at the very end of 2010. The iPhone was announced in January 2007 and they didn't have anything to compete until almost 4 years later. I'm…

Yeah, especially funny since they had the early lead with their iPaq PDAs and Windows CE. Which they completely squandered by ignoring them.

Then they acquired Nokia that already had an almost-ready ecosystem of apps, with good snappy UI. And then spent two years building a (shitty) framework on top of the long-neglected Windows CE kernel. Which was known from the start to be a stopgap solution before they port the full WinNT kernel.

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

#555

Post by pdonis » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 8:49 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #532

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…

Microsoft was a language company at the start - they had a huge share in 8-bit computers and their BASIC made into the ROMs of almost every computer sold in the 70s and 80s. Then they branched out to applications, with little success (I remember Multiplan on CP/M, DOS, and Mac). When they started selling PC-DOS and MS-DOS they had no applications play to speak of. Office only came much later, and the apps that appear…

> Office only came much later

In the sense of being marketed as a single integrated package, yes, I agree. I was using the term loosely to refer to the apps themselves (Word & Excel were the first two, as you note, the others came after).

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

#556

Post by cyberax » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 8:50 PM UTC

sdwr wrote: post #390

ZuLuuuuuu wrote: post #342

2 things Microsoft failed to do in the last 15 years are: 1) They abandoned their mobile phone, tablet, and wearable strategy. So, today if you develop a native Windows application, it will only work on desktops and laptops. That is it. It is not attractive for a developer to learn a whole new UI framework just to target a single form factor. And I don't know if there is any solution for this at this point, they shou…

Didn't Google give up on chromeOS? For all their faults, at least Microsoft has a desktop os

Not really. They are merging it with Android. Or in other words, they're making Android into a full-blown desktop OS.

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

#557

Post by pdonis » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 8:56 PM UTC

furyofantares wrote: post #337

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…

How do you reconcile this with their history of bending over backwards to achieve backwards compatibility for third parties?

Because their strategy for getting their applications in front of everyone has always been to get Windows in front of everyone, and that meant having to support third party applications that they chose not to try to incorporate into their own apps, but which got enough usage that not supporting them would mean losing those Windows desktops, and thus losing those users of the MS applications that were on every Windows desktop.

It's quite possible that this attributes too much intentional strategy to MS, and also treats them as a single entity with a single strategy more than they deserve. The MS internal teams that were bending over backwards to maintain backwards compatibility were not the same as the teams that were churning out new APIs, building Azure, etc., and quite likely had very different incentives.

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

#558

Post by radiator » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:04 PM UTC

vovavili wrote: post #470

throwaway2037 wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Qt? It is the gold standard for cross-platform desktop UI frameworks. It is (1) performant (C++-based), (2) does not look outdated, and (3) not bug-ridden.

In my experience: - Qt Widgets worked fine, but looked like a piece of software made in 2013; - QML looks stylish and is a very nice language, but had a lot of weird bugs. Neither of these are issues I'd run with if I were to make a web app.

> - Qt Widgets worked fine, but looked like a piece of software made in 2013;

That's too bad, because I prefer software which looks like it was made in 1999.

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

#559

Post by hermitcrab » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:07 PM UTC

okanat wrote: post #426

hermitcrab wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qt Small Business pricing is very reasonable.

You can also use LGPL. You only need to disclose the changes you made into Qt itself and allow changing it with another DLL. That's it.

Some modules, such as QtCharts, aren't available in the LGPL version.

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

#560

Post by rigonkulous » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:27 PM UTC

SyneRyder wrote: post #430

rigonkulous wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>desktop, productivity apps You can configure your JUCE project to build to any of the standard audio plugin formats, or for it to build a standalone app for the target platform (i.e. plugins, desktop, mobile, embedded) or indeed to build all of these targets, at once, in one build. However, during app (i.e. non-plugin) development I often switch between linux and macos environments as part of my workflow, and during…

You might have sold me on this, because on top of the productivity-ish stuff I do, I'd really love to get into VST development. If I hadn't fallen into Photoshop plugins first, I would always have been an audio plugin dev. I loved PSP VintageWarmer in the late 90s. The UI in Rowland's demo at 32min is feeling a little DearImGui / Reaper-ish, kinda bland while also being non-native. But I've seen all the UIs that Artu…

Well, I hope you will take a serious look at it as a technology stack worth learning, because when you get things rigged up so that you can really just push your changes into a repo and get the builds for all platforms, its some kind of magic, and you will - most likely - be really inspired to create something great.

Which, I hope, you do.

(PS; - the default UI skin is, imho, intentionally a tad bland in order to promote developer uptake of JUCE' pretty amazing skinning/UIBehaviour system...)