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:
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.
mrtksn 3 hours ago [-]
I remember when ChatGPT exploded and Bing had it integrated, the idea was brilliant because unlike ChatGPT it didn't have information cut-off since it can access the web. I was very excited to ditch Google for AI chat with web access.
How did MS actually implemented it though? After a few messages the chat is blocked because MS did not choose to walk the extra mile and maybe compact the context so that their product can be actually usable.
Of course OpenAI, Perplexity and others later implemented that properly and its integral part of modern AI chat and I actually ditched Google for the most part. Had Microsoft done it, they might have had a shot in replacing Google and maybe becoming the AI Chat provider. But no, Microsoft can't have a well thought UI to provide a delightful UX.
IMHO it's a culture thing. Lack of cohesion is a result of it, I used to be annoyed by Apple that doesn't allow to ship its own UI libraries together with the app so to support old versions etc. but Apple had it right, thanks to the limitations UI is coherent.
supliminal 3 hours ago [-]
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 improved even if they do have a strategy shift to enterprise which includes crapping all over Windows for no good reason.
I’m personally glad FOSS is going strong but that’s a complete aside.
[0] We got burned by Azure as I’m sure many other enterprises have, and they did exactly nothing to remedy/compensate the situation, SLAs be damned. At this point our strategy is to move off of reliance on any Microsoft/windows tech. We moved off of ActiveDirectory not too long ago. Bing/Edge/etc honestly who cares.
mapontosevenths 3 hours ago [-]
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.
nine_k 41 minutes ago [-]
Crucially, at enterprise sales, those who make putchase decisions are not the actual users (except maybe for Outlook and Excel). They sometimes play golf together with vendors though. This is how stuff like MS Teams of Oracle Forms gets sold: it checks all the compliance boxes, has support, an SLA, "is industry strength", etc.
mohamedkoubaa 2 hours ago [-]
The end state of genAI is that the end user is the enterprise
Krssst 2 hours ago [-]
The end state of genAI could as well be a few billionaires being their enterprise and everybody else being unemployed or working at the factory. Robots are not there yet (far from it) and someone needs to build and maintain the thing as well as food for everyone. High unemployment could drive salaries down and make lots of thing unavailable to the common people while making humans cheaper than automation for boring manual work.
That's an extreme scenario but today's politicians are not very keen into redistribution of wealth or prevention of excessive accumulation of economic power leading to exceeding the power of the state itself. I see nothing preventing that scenario from happening.
lenkite 6 hours ago [-]
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.
rbanffy 3 hours ago [-]
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 a relatively small part. Office is both desktop and web (and spacecraft, where they have two versions of Outlook and none of them works). If you are confused at this point, so am I. There is no vision as to what Microsoft is. If Satya Nadella knows what Microsoft is, he isn’t communicating it properly. It’s not Azure, because there is also Office and Windows. And on-prem server products. And a line of hardware products. And stores (do they still exist?).
hyperrail 49 minutes ago [-]
Microsoft has always had a broad vision of itself as a technology company; I feel it's perfectly fine to not be able to describe Microsoft in one sentence without using platitudes like "empower every person on Earth to achieve more" or "put a computer in every home and every office" (both paraphrases of actual MSFT company mission statements), and I suspect many other current and former Microsoft employees would feel the same way.
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.
pdonis 2 hours ago [-]
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 previous bonehead decision to hand the PC OS market to them, MS was selling Office applications--on the Macintosh.
The basic Windows API, in all of its many incarnations, has always been a second-class citizen; MS Office applications have always done their own things that other Windows applications couldn't do without using undocumented features that MS could change at any time (and often did). One could argue that the only reason MS even allowed third-party Windows developers to exist was so that they would, in the words of one of PG's essays, do market research for MS. When a third-party dev came up with something that got enough traction, MS would simply incorporate it into their apps.
coliveira 46 minutes ago [-]
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.
drob518 3 hours ago [-]
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.
gdhkgdhkvff 2 hours ago [-]
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?
a_vanderbilt 2 hours ago [-]
In theory, the market should be pricing in based on future potential. As it has become increasingly clear this past decade, the market is not rational.
drob518 49 minutes ago [-]
In a bubble, everyone looks like they’re doing well. Don’t confuse that with an actual strategy.
gdhkgdhkvff 35 minutes ago [-]
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.
bigstrat2003 25 minutes ago [-]
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.
andsoitis 14 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
stefan_ 2 hours ago [-]
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.
collabs 1 hours ago [-]
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?
coliveira 44 minutes ago [-]
Most probably it was on purpose. MS is famous for the infighting of internal groups and how the management doesn't know how to control their divisions.
garganzol 22 minutes ago [-]
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.
PaulHoule 8 hours ago [-]
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!. I use Windows every day but I almost exclusively develop cross-platform systems based on the WWW, Java, Python, etc. Whenever I have developed with .NET it has been for a cross-platform front-end like Silverlight or Unity/itch.io.
I can’t say I have a desire to make a native Windows GUI app when I could make a web app: like if it worth doing from my computer isn’t it worth doing it on my iPad from anywhere with Tailscale? For all the complaints about modern JavaScript it gives you the pieces to make a very pleasant world in terms of DX and UX and you certainly don’t need to ship an Electron runtime for many applications.
judah 3 hours ago [-]
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 make sense.
Just build for the web. You can package web apps for all the major app stores using PWABuilder[0], no Electron needed. Just fast, lightweight apps distributed by app stores and accessible from the web.
> 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 make sense.
For me, I see these following advantages:
- Performance; Native & compiled is king.
- Ram usage; Kilobytes vs Mega(giga?)bytes.
- UI control which integrates with the rest of the OS (and updates when the underlying OS tweaks the UI)
From a business standpoint, I get your point that these points don't really matter. Users have shown to not care in the slightest at the bloat in programs.
However for code I write in my spare time, I would much rather write my native Linux program in compiled code than to ship a subpar experience to the few who will interact with it.
jemmyw 3 hours ago [-]
I used to get hung up on this native vs web thing. But when it comes down to it, it's just one renderer or another unless you're actually drawing the controls yourself pixel by pixel. The sticking point is following the system style / theme. But all the popular desktop OSs seem to have deviated on this so much themselves I'm not sure how important this is.
trueno 1 hours ago [-]
yea there's so many ways through this now. golang and wails is great, rust and tauri is great. both seem to not feel like the slug that is electron because they just use whatever os native web view your os has.
for the dedicated more native stuff dioxus is kinda cool if you don't want a web stack in the mix.
i'm enjoying golang and wails though paired with whatever front end i want, all apps i've made perform execellent on windows. bottom line = yeah i can't really think of a scenario where i personally would ever write an app for windows specifically.
i, like you, used to get hung up on native vs web framework. i'd encourage you to give it a go, possible you cede that mayhaps the native thing isn't as important as you thought.
skydhash 2 hours ago [-]
The DOM is very ill-suited for most UI. Too complex and lots of missing features. It’s a whole bag of unneeded code and the resulting UI doesn’t fit anywhere.
bigstrat2003 19 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
bigstrat2003 21 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
regularfry 6 hours ago [-]
Having spent some time kicking around the Delphi space I got quite into WPF in 2007ish. By 2010 I had not just sworn off it, I'd sworn off Windows entirely. The constant stream of rug-pulls as one bit of MS managed to pull off a political heist over another and - oh no - yet another "latest and greatest" technology was effectively deprecated within 18 months of launch, invalidating all the effort you put in to staying up to date just became a pointless treadmill.
Fortunately Rails was taking off at that point so it was fairly easy to change horses and just ignore it.
PacificSpecific 6 hours ago [-]
If I'm writing Windows desktop GUIs I still stick to WPF. Might be Stockholm syndrome but I quite like it.
I don't see the reason to use any of the new ms ui frameworks. Especially if ms themselves don't even really use them.
As far as I know visual studio is still a WPF project so I'm not super worried about it no longer working.
RajT88 5 hours ago [-]
WPF looks much nicer. Personally I find it hard as hell to debug.
Winforms just work, and have a well defined set of behaviors. It does not matter that they do not look as nice for most people.
imron 3 hours ago [-]
That’s not so bad. I still stick to win32
taylodl 6 hours ago [-]
Microsoft had a lot of great talent suffering from a lack of leadership and coherent vision. They foreshadowed everything wrong with Big Tech today.
calvinmorrison 4 hours ago [-]
At the same time VB still works and runs, so they don't always rug pull.
rbanffy 3 hours ago [-]
They might have forgotten to pull that rug.
int_19h 2 hours ago [-]
Definitely not, since it actually takes quite a lot of red tape to ship something as ancient as MSVBVM60.DLL in Windows 30 years later, and guarantee that it is still working.
It's just that it's a piece of tech from back when Microsoft corporate dominance on the desktop was at its peak, and many large companies bought into the then-current tech stack, including VB6. So now Microsoft is stuck maintaining it because those are the customers that bring consistent revenue.
baud9600 3 hours ago [-]
At Redmond, there was also the Patterns & Practices group (P&P) that tried to make sense of the dev products, and built extra libraries “to show customers how to use them”. They followed the bouncing ball of the frameworks releases from the main development teams. It suggests that it wasn’t clear exactly how you’d use the main products: so P&P said, ‘try it like this.’
I also think the article didn’t say much about MS in the web era. The company survived webdev IMO, but it definitely wasn’t the leader
rbanffy 4 hours ago [-]
> From their perspective, gambling on a new managed-code framework had produced the most embarrassing failure in the company’s history
Most embarrassing failure in the company’s history that far.
markus_zhang 6 hours ago [-]
Steven Sinofsky wrote this piece a couple of weeks ago about the same topic:
It's very amusing to see Sinofsky of all people all but dumping on .NET and (still?!) not understanding why developers so proactively jumped ship from Win32 & MFC hell to WinForms. Or why the HTML/JS app model in Win8 never really took off.
I was in DevDiv during his great WinRT push and the overall feeling I remember was that the guys in Windows had zero clue as to what the devs actually wanted, but were hell bent on scorching all the ground that wasn't theirs. My team actually did some prototyping for Python/WinRT support, and we had it working to the point of the visual WPF designer in Visual Studio even. Unlike JS, it was full fledged - you could use anything in WinRT same as C#, extend classes etc, while JS limited you to a "consumer" surface of the API. That prototype was killed because Windows (i.e. at the time = Sinofsky) said they didn't think developers cared about anything but JS so they didn't need another high level language.
It was also when Windows was aggressively pushing their Metro styling on everything in the company, sometimes to ridiculous lengths - e.g. Visual Studio at the time "aligned" with Metro by, I kid you not, making the main menu bar ALL UPPER CASE so that it looked like Metro tabs! You can still see the blog posts announcing this "feature" when it shipped in the first public beta of VS 2012, and the comments on them.
And then there was Windows RT (not to be confused with WinRT, because Microsoft product naming!). Aka the Windows-on-ARM that ditched decades of backwards compatibility because Sinofsky decided that rebooting the ecosystem is the only way to compete with iPad or whatever. What actually happened was that the users went WTF because none of their native apps - which, contrary to his take, were very much alive and kicking! - worked there, and devs went WTF because they were told that they'd need to rewrite everything yet again in some new thing that was kinda sorta but not quite like WPF, because Windows just hated .NET that much and couldn't accept that the devs liked it over their stuff. So the app store was a barren waste, and without apps there would be no users.
Some of the technical details in there are plain wrong, too. For instance, .NET 3.0 actually shipped in Vista, contrary to his claim that it was shipped in Win7 (and that it was the first time .NET shipped in consumer Windows - in fact, that would be .NET 1.1 shipping in WinXP SP1).
cjbgkagh 2 hours ago [-]
Often kind of person who makes such mistakes is the kind of person unable to learn from them. The post by Sinofsky is exactly as I imagined it would be.
dang 4 hours ago [-]
Since that article is a response to this one, we'll add a link to it in the toptext above. Thanks!
markus_zhang 2 hours ago [-]
Thank you!
5 hours ago [-]
2 hours ago [-]
barrkel 2 hours ago [-]
Windows frameworks got web envy.
Xaml and styling and all sorts to try and compete.
Trouble is, it made desktop development harder, and it didn't win against the web. It left the simple and safe formula of standard and common controls for a designer's playground, but the designers preferred the web. And if you make something for the web, you can package it in Electron and get cross platform cheaply.
bananaflag 6 hours ago [-]
This barely mentions Windows Forms, which is the cleanest and fastest way to code Windows GUI apps.
A few years ago, I wanted to prototype something quick and I wrote it in Windows Forms over C# (all code, no visual editor).
Almondsetat 3 hours ago [-]
>This barely mentions Windows Forms
Apparently, you do too, since what you said is basically the same as what the article said (.NET wrapper for C#, fastest prototyping to date)
formerly_proven 6 hours ago [-]
Winforms is a Win32 API wrapper, so on the same level as MFC, not a separate UI framework.
int_19h 2 hours ago [-]
It is a wrapper, but it's not quite on the same level as MFC. MFC really is a thin wrapper, almost 1:1 in most places. WinForms is more like VCL or VB6 in that it uses Win32 where it can but doesn't design around it, so in practice it's more high-level.
garganzol 56 minutes ago [-]
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-level windows.
Another PITA: Electron apps repeatedly bundle large portions of Chromium, leading to unnecessary overhead. Those duplicated modules lead to bloated RAM usage: every app has its own Chromium copy and OS must keep all that zoo in RAM without a possibility of reusing the otherwise shareable parts.
disconcision 45 minutes ago [-]
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).
vachina 41 minutes ago [-]
It is despised for the same reason web based UI is despised today. Firefox OS was also “too early”.
w4yai 52 minutes ago [-]
I've been hearing that for 10+ years. This is not going to happen.
garganzol 50 minutes ago [-]
This has already happened de-facto. Optimize it properly, and the whole problem disappears.
lazide 50 minutes ago [-]
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.
garganzol 41 minutes ago [-]
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.
lazide 29 minutes ago [-]
Uh huh.
13 minutes ago [-]
Retr0id 2 hours ago [-]
A decade or so ago, I had a clear idea of what a "native ui" should look and feel like, even if there were multiple routes to get there. I don't know any more.
senfiaj 2 hours ago [-]
For some reason I associate this with this article
This is what happens when one's performance is measured by "impact".
hermitcrab 5 hours ago [-]
Microsoft GUI development is a mess. They don't seem to care. Just look at the mishmash of different GUI styles in Windows 11.
Thankfully I have been mostly insulated from it by sticking to Qt and C++ for the last 25 years.
joezydeco 2 hours ago [-]
Qt/Win is enough to get the job done. Not always pretty, but it works. I used to be somewhat ashamed I never learned the actual Win32 API to write native apps, but now it looks like that was time saved. This is a great article.
fg137 2 hours ago [-]
Worth mentioning a discussion on a similar blog post two weeks ago;
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?
pragmatic 17 minutes ago [-]
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?
markus_zhang 6 hours ago [-]
I think Bill pretty much chilled out since he stepped down?
Maxatar 3 hours ago [-]
I just looked into this a bit because I thought he still had some kind of role at Microsoft even after leaving as CEO/chairman, but it turns out that in 2020 he left any and all positions at Microsoft as it was investigating him over inappropriate sexual relationships he had with Microsoft employees.
Before that he had a role as a technical advisor and sat on the board of directors.
I also found it interesting that Steve Ballmer owns considerably more of Microsoft than Bill Gates (4% for Steve Ballmer while Bill Gates owns less than 1%).
cjbgkagh 3 hours ago [-]
He’s still around as a part time advisor, he has to officially step back or no one would take Satya seriously, but on important stuff like AI he is a bit more active.
binarymax 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah of course. He has nothing to do with Microsoft operations or strategy. But does he still use the products?
seanmcdirmid 6 hours ago [-]
He still visits Microsoft occasionally. A friend showed me a picture of him visiting Microsoft in Beijing a few months ago (he was excited about BillG visiting). So my guess is that he still has an interest in Microsoft products.
throwaway132448 6 hours ago [-]
I couldn’t know, but generally speaking, older billionaires don’t typically interact with the world in the same way most of us do (well, those without a social media addiction anyway). The device is someone else’s problem.
calvinmorrison 4 hours ago [-]
He's mostly been hanging with Epstein and asking for people to buy him STD medication due to his endless trysts
bossyTeacher 6 hours ago [-]
If he doesn't use Windows, you won't hear about it. And if you hear that he uses Windows, it might not be true. He loses nothing by denying it. If it worked for his friendship with Epstein, it will work here.
HumblyTossed 3 hours ago [-]
I very much dislike WPF. If I have to do a windows UI (and usually when I do it's a simulator for some piece of hardware), I honestly just grab WinForms. It's stupid simple.
SDRPlay is using Avalonia for its SDRConnect desktop UI. That's the one native application based on Avalonia I've spent significant time in.
It's ok. I give it pretty high marks. There is a good deal of "lowest common denominator" in it, naturally due to cross platform abstraction. But, it's generally nice, and commercial licenses are affordable.
teyc 3 hours ago [-]
The web revolution is to Windows UI what vibe coding is to programming today. It brought in a massive group of people who didn't need to understand message pumps, or handles or non-blocking api calls. On top of that, it delivered incrementally more capable result each year. View source taught millions how to build modals, blurred overlay. Meanwhile, the old group of programmers were still worrying about how to protect the knowhow behind compiled languages.
3 hours ago [-]
userbinator 2 hours ago [-]
The tl;dr is basically to stay with Win32 and ignore all the new and shiny.
That AI image at the end was more amusing than informative. Almost lost it at "Win15" and "Chrondum + frade.js".
supliminal 6 hours ago [-]
I used the more recent Petzold examples to successfully bind DirectWrite to Direct3D, but yeah it’s been a crapshoot otherwise. Still have the Windows Programming (5e?) bible around here somewhere. Took awhile to grind through it. I dread modern-day windows programming it seems like every OS release some new API is going to overtake the others. I moved on.
hyperrail 3 hours ago [-]
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 they were doing at that time or speaking up about what they were observing then, or they know they're at fault and want to deceptively distract us from that fact. Either way, ask yourself this: "Aren't they sorry?" If they're not, just move on.
ack_complete 2 hours ago [-]
The most offensive part of the Sinofsky response is this part:
> WinRT (2012) - it (or the embodiment in Windows 8) failed in the market but it also showed both the problem and potential solution to building for new markets while respecting the past
I can't express how wrong this is. WinRT was the most destructive thing that the Windows team ever did to the OS. It drove a hard stake into Windows, splitting it in half and declaring that anything previous to Windows 8, oriented toward desktop, or using primary input through mouse and keyboard over touch was dead. Microsoft basically told all existing Windows developers that if they weren't building a new, touch-oriented, mobile-style app specifically for Windows 8, they didn't matter and wouldn't get any support whatsoever, which is exactly what happened every time they broke existing desktop functionality. Calling this "respecting the past" is a crass insult and taking no responsibility for damaging the Windows development experience and accelerating development away from native Windows apps.
jiggawatts 16 minutes ago [-]
“Retired general criticises the Pentagon” is practically a trope.
jpeter 5 hours ago [-]
So the windows team hates .NET, so they use react webviews and put them in explorer and start menu???
int_19h 2 hours ago [-]
You have managed to concisely summarize the progress of Windows UI development for the past 15 years, yes.
praisewhitey 4 hours ago [-]
They use react native
whynotmaybe 6 hours ago [-]
As of today, I only use 2 solutions for Windows GUI :
- windows forms in .net
- flutter
All the rest always presents itself with a sheer aura of "It was a great idea but we couldn't finish it".
Without ever discussing with anyone from MS about it, I think they stopped improving/working on this because of electron.
Any web developer can build a good enough website and a good enough desktop app with electron.
Surac 6 hours ago [-]
Today i still use C# with Windows.Forms. All my old knowledge is still usefull. People know how to use a Windows.Forms program.
grebc 5 hours ago [-]
It’s great, some vendors have fantastic component libraries for reasonable prices.
Unreal that MS bet the farm in Windows on so many other turds instead of boring old WinForms/Win32.
nusl 3 hours ago [-]
This article smells so strongly of AI that I'd be surprised if the author did much of any writing.
boutell 3 hours ago [-]
I found the article itself very informative and not particularly ai-tastic. But then I got to that infographic at the end. Holy smokes was that disappointing. It seems clear they didn't even bother to read the captions the AI scribbled.
belkinpower 2 hours ago [-]
It starts out alright, and then ends with a pile of classic Claude-isms and an unreadable slop graphic. Like the author got bored of writing it halfway through.
goalieca 6 hours ago [-]
The writing style was really poor. Too many words saying too few things.
luma 2 hours ago [-]
Entirely AI. I just can't with this style anymore.
steve1977 6 hours ago [-]
That illustration at the end of the article is quite something.
g-b-r 5 hours ago [-]
Quite some slop
Has it become unreasonable to use an image editor for anything? At least to stamp some readable text on top of your slop??
kjellsbells 5 hours ago [-]
I blame "Impact". That's what you are graded on at Microsoft. Every performance review ('Connect'), every stock award, every promotion run: did this person have that magical impact.
Ostensibly, grading by impact is fine: they want people who make a positive difference. In reality, it means that creating is better than finishing. Now add in the cold realities that at any given time in Microsoft, some groups are on the up and some on the down. What's a great way for a group to regain some status? Launch something. Jazz it up for the Build or Ignite crowd. Get some dev evangelist to talk about it. Then get on the job board and slide over to another team ASAP. You're a High Impact person. Who wouldn't be happy to have you?
arbirk 5 hours ago [-]
I think that is an insult to MS Bob
segphault 3 hours ago [-]
It's bad enough that Microsoft doesn't have a satisfying answer to this question, but what makes it worse is that WinUI feels weirdly non-native in ways that sort of uncomfortably result in Electron apps feeling more like real Windows applications.
It's worth noting though that Apple is on a similar trajectory and is now in a very nearly as bad position given all the serious issues with SwiftUI and how badly it has fragmented/degraded Mac desktop application development.
It's almost like the major desktop platform vendors have all given up on supporting high-quality native desktop applications.
GeekyBear 2 hours ago [-]
> It's worth noting though that Apple is on a similar trajectory and is now in a very nearly as bad position given all the serious issues with SwiftUI and how badly it has fragmented/degraded Mac desktop application development.
Apple (and Next before it) have been iterating on Appkit/UIKit for three and a half decades.
Now they have added SwiftUI as a second option and have been iterating on it for a bit over half a decade.
This is in no way similar to Microsoft creating and abandoning another UI framework every couple of years.
If Microsoft had been steadily improving Win32 all these years, where would it be today?
Did they even try to make it look like the new context menus?
okanat 5 hours ago [-]
Well, Edge is Chromium. They need to maintain a hard fork, not just a reskin with a bunch of Microsoft webpages and adware. Chromium basically allocates a window and completely draws everything inside using DirectX APIs including menus.
pipeline_peak 3 hours ago [-]
Why tie your app to Windows at all?
Microsoft developed VS Code and Teams in Electron. That says a lot about how they see the future.
api 5 hours ago [-]
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.
antiframe 5 hours ago [-]
Not nobody. KDE has a functional and consistent GUI.
lunar_rover 2 hours ago [-]
The problem with things from the Linux world is that they never reached the height of commercial desktops to begin with.
If you really enjoy worse Windows XP UX with hamburger menus in recent versions then by all means go ahead, it does function.
brookst 2 hours ago [-]
s/\sGUI\s/\s/g
zer0zzz 2 hours ago [-]
Couldn’t someone do a similar story about scripting on windows, and make Jeffrey Snover one of the punchlines?
dev1ycan 2 hours ago [-]
Starting with Metro every Windows UI framework has been beyond ugly. there's just something so backwards over how nice the UI was in Windows 7, I simply can't understand it.
4 hours ago [-]
anthk 4 hours ago [-]
OLE objects are just like disk images.
fassssst 6 hours ago [-]
It’s web. Just use electron or Tauri.
TazeTSchnitzel 6 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure I can take such an article seriously if it doesn't mention that the WinRT/UWP/WinUI stack is also based on XAML, and that a fundamental design goal of WinRT was to let people use either C++ or C# according to taste.
Also, the AI smell in this article is just too much.
furyofantares 6 hours ago [-]
> Dead silence. One person suggested WPF. Another said WinUI 3. A third asked if they should just use Electron. The meeting went sideways and we never did answer the question.
> That silence is the story.
These LLMs are just awful at writing.
super256 6 hours ago [-]
I felt fatigued after the second paragraph. All these LLM tropes chained together are horrible to read.
operatingthetan 4 hours ago [-]
This site needs a no LLM submissions policy too.
grg0 3 hours ago [-]
I flagged the post, don't even care how accurate it is. Go send your AI slop to /dev/null, folks.
stinkbeetle 5 hours ago [-]
Yes they really do a great job at mimicking awful human writing of that horrendous style, whatever it's called. Post-TED NPR style bougie blogging let's say.
3 hours ago [-]
c-c-c-c-c 6 hours ago [-]
that part really didn’t make sense to me. This is true for all desktop platforms.
furyofantares 6 hours ago [-]
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?
avazhi 6 hours ago [-]
He immediately said they never did make a decision, so probably that indecision.
Having said that, this article feels like AI slop to me. Couldn’t get through it.
g-b-r 5 hours ago [-]
Just have a look at the final picture if you're unsure if it's slop
politelemon 5 hours ago [-]
This is a problem with all the OSes.
antiframe 5 hours ago [-]
I disagree. KDE and Gnome both have pretty consistent UI strategies. You may or may not like them but they have clear identities and design guidelines and follow them.
mentalgear 6 hours ago [-]
I'm planing on switching over to QubesOS - way more secure (especially considering rogue LLM-agents) and visually not much worse from windows ... maybe even more cohesive.
Rendered at 02:32:11 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
How did MS actually implemented it though? After a few messages the chat is blocked because MS did not choose to walk the extra mile and maybe compact the context so that their product can be actually usable.
Of course OpenAI, Perplexity and others later implemented that properly and its integral part of modern AI chat and I actually ditched Google for the most part. Had Microsoft done it, they might have had a shot in replacing Google and maybe becoming the AI Chat provider. But no, Microsoft can't have a well thought UI to provide a delightful UX.
IMHO it's a culture thing. Lack of cohesion is a result of it, I used to be annoyed by Apple that doesn't allow to ship its own UI libraries together with the app so to support old versions etc. but Apple had it right, thanks to the limitations UI is coherent.
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 improved even if they do have a strategy shift to enterprise which includes crapping all over Windows for no good reason.
I’m personally glad FOSS is going strong but that’s a complete aside.
[0] We got burned by Azure as I’m sure many other enterprises have, and they did exactly nothing to remedy/compensate the situation, SLAs be damned. At this point our strategy is to move off of reliance on any Microsoft/windows tech. We moved off of ActiveDirectory not too long ago. Bing/Edge/etc honestly who cares.
Any trade-off that favors the enterprise in lieu of the user actually benefits nobody in the long term.
That's an extreme scenario but today's politicians are not very keen into redistribution of wealth or prevention of excessive accumulation of economic power leading to exceeding the power of the state itself. I see nothing preventing that scenario from happening.
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.
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 a relatively small part. Office is both desktop and web (and spacecraft, where they have two versions of Outlook and none of them works). If you are confused at this point, so am I. There is no vision as to what Microsoft is. If Satya Nadella knows what Microsoft is, he isn’t communicating it properly. It’s not Azure, because there is also Office and Windows. And on-prem server products. And a line of hardware products. And stores (do they still exist?).
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.
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 previous bonehead decision to hand the PC OS market to them, MS was selling Office applications--on the Macintosh.
The basic Windows API, in all of its many incarnations, has always been a second-class citizen; MS Office applications have always done their own things that other Windows applications couldn't do without using undocumented features that MS could change at any time (and often did). One could argue that the only reason MS even allowed third-party Windows developers to exist was so that they would, in the words of one of PG's essays, do market research for MS. When a third-party dev came up with something that got enough traction, MS would simply incorporate it into their apps.
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.
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.
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?
I would not be surprised if you still cannot launch a fricking .exe.
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!. I use Windows every day but I almost exclusively develop cross-platform systems based on the WWW, Java, Python, etc. Whenever I have developed with .NET it has been for a cross-platform front-end like Silverlight or Unity/itch.io.
I can’t say I have a desire to make a native Windows GUI app when I could make a web app: like if it worth doing from my computer isn’t it worth doing it on my iPad from anywhere with Tailscale? For all the complaints about modern JavaScript it gives you the pieces to make a very pleasant world in terms of DX and UX and you certainly don’t need to ship an Electron runtime for many applications.
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 make sense.
Just build for the web. You can package web apps for all the major app stores using PWABuilder[0], no Electron needed. Just fast, lightweight apps distributed by app stores and accessible from the web.
[0]: https://pwabuilder.com. Disclaimer: I work on this
For me, I see these following advantages:
- Performance; Native & compiled is king.
- Ram usage; Kilobytes vs Mega(giga?)bytes.
- UI control which integrates with the rest of the OS (and updates when the underlying OS tweaks the UI)
From a business standpoint, I get your point that these points don't really matter. Users have shown to not care in the slightest at the bloat in programs.
However for code I write in my spare time, I would much rather write my native Linux program in compiled code than to ship a subpar experience to the few who will interact with it.
for the dedicated more native stuff dioxus is kinda cool if you don't want a web stack in the mix.
i'm enjoying golang and wails though paired with whatever front end i want, all apps i've made perform execellent on windows. bottom line = yeah i can't really think of a scenario where i personally would ever write an app for windows specifically.
i, like you, used to get hung up on native vs web framework. i'd encourage you to give it a go, possible you cede that mayhaps the native thing isn't as important as you thought.
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.
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.
Fortunately Rails was taking off at that point so it was fairly easy to change horses and just ignore it.
I don't see the reason to use any of the new ms ui frameworks. Especially if ms themselves don't even really use them.
As far as I know visual studio is still a WPF project so I'm not super worried about it no longer working.
Winforms just work, and have a well defined set of behaviors. It does not matter that they do not look as nice for most people.
It's just that it's a piece of tech from back when Microsoft corporate dominance on the desktop was at its peak, and many large companies bought into the then-current tech stack, including VB6. So now Microsoft is stuck maintaining it because those are the customers that bring consistent revenue.
Most embarrassing failure in the company’s history that far.
https://x.com/stevesi/status/2036921223150440542
I was in DevDiv during his great WinRT push and the overall feeling I remember was that the guys in Windows had zero clue as to what the devs actually wanted, but were hell bent on scorching all the ground that wasn't theirs. My team actually did some prototyping for Python/WinRT support, and we had it working to the point of the visual WPF designer in Visual Studio even. Unlike JS, it was full fledged - you could use anything in WinRT same as C#, extend classes etc, while JS limited you to a "consumer" surface of the API. That prototype was killed because Windows (i.e. at the time = Sinofsky) said they didn't think developers cared about anything but JS so they didn't need another high level language.
It was also when Windows was aggressively pushing their Metro styling on everything in the company, sometimes to ridiculous lengths - e.g. Visual Studio at the time "aligned" with Metro by, I kid you not, making the main menu bar ALL UPPER CASE so that it looked like Metro tabs! You can still see the blog posts announcing this "feature" when it shipped in the first public beta of VS 2012, and the comments on them.
And then there was Windows RT (not to be confused with WinRT, because Microsoft product naming!). Aka the Windows-on-ARM that ditched decades of backwards compatibility because Sinofsky decided that rebooting the ecosystem is the only way to compete with iPad or whatever. What actually happened was that the users went WTF because none of their native apps - which, contrary to his take, were very much alive and kicking! - worked there, and devs went WTF because they were told that they'd need to rewrite everything yet again in some new thing that was kinda sorta but not quite like WPF, because Windows just hated .NET that much and couldn't accept that the devs liked it over their stuff. So the app store was a barren waste, and without apps there would be no users.
Some of the technical details in there are plain wrong, too. For instance, .NET 3.0 actually shipped in Vista, contrary to his claim that it was shipped in Win7 (and that it was the first time .NET shipped in consumer Windows - in fact, that would be .NET 1.1 shipping in WinXP SP1).
Xaml and styling and all sorts to try and compete.
Trouble is, it made desktop development harder, and it didn't win against the web. It left the simple and safe formula of standard and common controls for a designer's playground, but the designers preferred the web. And if you make something for the web, you can package it in Electron and get cross platform cheaply.
A few years ago, I wanted to prototype something quick and I wrote it in Windows Forms over C# (all code, no visual editor).
Apparently, you do too, since what you said is basically the same as what the article said (.NET wrapper for C#, fastest prototyping to date)
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-level windows.
Another PITA: Electron apps repeatedly bundle large portions of Chromium, leading to unnecessary overhead. Those duplicated modules lead to bloated RAM usage: every app has its own Chromium copy and OS must keep all that zoo in RAM without a possibility of reusing the otherwise shareable parts.
Orders of magnitude more BS, plumbing, awkwardness, head scratching, etc.
https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/
Thankfully I have been mostly insulated from it by sticking to Qt and C++ for the last 25 years.
Windows Native App Development Is a Mess
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47475938
That Bill Gates?
Seems he might have other priorities these days?
Before that he had a role as a technical advisor and sat on the board of directors.
I also found it interesting that Steve Ballmer owns considerably more of Microsoft than Bill Gates (4% for Steve Ballmer while Bill Gates owns less than 1%).
It's ok. I give it pretty high marks. There is a good deal of "lowest common denominator" in it, naturally due to cross platform abstraction. But, it's generally nice, and commercial licenses are affordable.
That AI image at the end was more amusing than informative. Almost lost it at "Win15" and "Chrondum + frade.js".
People who play this corrosive game either refuse to believe that they are at fault for not changing what they were doing at that time or speaking up about what they were observing then, or they know they're at fault and want to deceptively distract us from that fact. Either way, ask yourself this: "Aren't they sorry?" If they're not, just move on.
> WinRT (2012) - it (or the embodiment in Windows 8) failed in the market but it also showed both the problem and potential solution to building for new markets while respecting the past
I can't express how wrong this is. WinRT was the most destructive thing that the Windows team ever did to the OS. It drove a hard stake into Windows, splitting it in half and declaring that anything previous to Windows 8, oriented toward desktop, or using primary input through mouse and keyboard over touch was dead. Microsoft basically told all existing Windows developers that if they weren't building a new, touch-oriented, mobile-style app specifically for Windows 8, they didn't matter and wouldn't get any support whatsoever, which is exactly what happened every time they broke existing desktop functionality. Calling this "respecting the past" is a crass insult and taking no responsibility for damaging the Windows development experience and accelerating development away from native Windows apps.
- windows forms in .net
- flutter
All the rest always presents itself with a sheer aura of "It was a great idea but we couldn't finish it".
Without ever discussing with anyone from MS about it, I think they stopped improving/working on this because of electron.
Any web developer can build a good enough website and a good enough desktop app with electron.
Unreal that MS bet the farm in Windows on so many other turds instead of boring old WinForms/Win32.
Has it become unreasonable to use an image editor for anything? At least to stamp some readable text on top of your slop??
Ostensibly, grading by impact is fine: they want people who make a positive difference. In reality, it means that creating is better than finishing. Now add in the cold realities that at any given time in Microsoft, some groups are on the up and some on the down. What's a great way for a group to regain some status? Launch something. Jazz it up for the Build or Ignite crowd. Get some dev evangelist to talk about it. Then get on the job board and slide over to another team ASAP. You're a High Impact person. Who wouldn't be happy to have you?
It's worth noting though that Apple is on a similar trajectory and is now in a very nearly as bad position given all the serious issues with SwiftUI and how badly it has fragmented/degraded Mac desktop application development.
It's almost like the major desktop platform vendors have all given up on supporting high-quality native desktop applications.
Apple (and Next before it) have been iterating on Appkit/UIKit for three and a half decades.
Now they have added SwiftUI as a second option and have been iterating on it for a bit over half a decade.
This is in no way similar to Microsoft creating and abandoning another UI framework every couple of years.
If Microsoft had been steadily improving Win32 all these years, where would it be today?
https://imgur.com/a/dWp5Ohj
Did they even try to make it look like the new context menus?
Microsoft developed VS Code and Teams in Electron. That says a lot about how they see the future.
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.
If you really enjoy worse Windows XP UX with hamburger menus in recent versions then by all means go ahead, it does function.
Also, the AI smell in this article is just too much.
> That silence is the story.
These LLMs are just awful at writing.
Having said that, this article feels like AI slop to me. Couldn’t get through it.