Hacker News Reader

Comment by daxfohl | Hacker News Reader

> Yes, this meant that Windows was by design a worse platform in terms of the end user experience than, say, Mac OS, but it was far more powerful and extensible, an approach that paid off with millions of line of business apps that even today keep Windows at the center of business.

Is there any validity to this? I don't do much OS-level programming, but is the Win32 API really that much more powerful and extensible?

View on HN

To give one example: Windows Explorer has been extensible since Windows 95. That was 21 years ago. Dropbox has to pull nasty hacks to integrate with the macOS Finder [1]. That's now.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463338

That's not really an OS level thing, though. That's an application level thing. Finder was chosen not to be extensible, and Explorer was. There are Finder replacements that are.

OS is usually taken to mean kernel + core applications.

Are Explorer and Finder "core"? Probably.

> Is there any validity to this? I don't do much OS-level programming, but is the Win32 API really that much more powerful and extensible?

I certainly don't think so (although there are some nice things about the Windows kernel, if one comes from a VMS background), and it's certainly not the reason for the success of Windows. Remember that MS-DOS beat Mac OS; Windows 1 beat Mac OS; Windows 3.1 beat Mac OS; Windows 95 beat Mac OS. None of those was technically any good whatsoever, and only one of those had a UI that was worth shaking a stick at.

The reasons for the success of Windows are non-technical: Bill Gates's mother served on a charity board with the chairman of IBM; business bought IBM computers because no-one ever got fired for buying IBM; IBM clones were cheaper than Macs; IBM clones were more extensible and hackable than Macs; Unix workstation vendors thought they could keep milking their cash cows; Microsoft engaged in noncompetitive behaviour; random chance.

So kinda kills the primary analogy the article is based on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com