Comment by hn_check | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_check | Hacker News Reader

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We should note that the Windows app store is a massive failure, so Microsoft's actions as an also-ran are going to be "benevolent" and "open" because they have nothing to lose. Browse through the derelict mess that is the app store to understand just how miserable their state is. The overwhelming bulk of sales in the Windows app store are Microsoft's own products.

Recall when Microsoft was lagging far behind the other cool instant messenger kids, and was loudly crying for open interoperability and cooperation. Once MSN Messenger had a foothold, it slammed shut and their noble goals dissolved. Microsoft is certainly not alone in this self-serving morality -- it is a logical position -- but they do have a lot of examples in their corporate history.

Apparently the Microsoft employees are out in force today. It's also interesting how making an observation like this -- that the Windows app store is a failure -- leads people to pigeonhole. As I sit here on my Lenova 720 in Windows 10 Pro cross compiling an app between Windows and Linux in the WSL...hurrrRRRRrrr)

Even earlier than MSN Messenger was the RTF document format, promoted by Microsoft as an interoperability format to allow them to co-exist with Microsoft Word in a market dominated by WordPerfect, WordStar, etc.

And of course Microsoft dropped RTF like a hot potato when they managed to use their new Microsoft Windows platform to leverage into a huge market advantage for Microsoft Word. Other vendors were obviously initially reluctant to spend enormous resources to port their software to Windows, a competitor’s platform, but Microsoft could spend hugely on developent of Microsoft Word for Windows, making it very impressive graphically, and when the Windows platform was successful, all other word processing software vendors were left behind, forced to play catch-up. I also remember hearing that Microsoft were using secret Windows APIs to get nice things like toolbar icons in color, not available to non-Microsoft companies.

It's interesting RTF is discontinued when it is still the default format on the included word processor in Windows. I checked WordPad on Windows 10 and it still saves to RTF by default, though it supports docx and odt as well.

Unless they changed something the last couple of years, WordPad is just a wrapper around the Windows rich edit common control[1], which as its name implies, is based around RTF[2].

[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/rich...

[2]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/em-s...

Microsoft is famously backwards-compatible, and support for RTF is still present in those programs which originally had it, like Write, the included word processor in Windows since Windows 1 (replaced in Windows 95 with WordPad, which retains its features). But is RTF usable for its original purpose – interoperability? Can you open a reasonably complex Word document and save it as RTF, and then open it in LibreOffice? Can you save an RTF document from LibreOffice and open it in Microsoft Word without loss? Is Microsoft working to maintain RTF interoperability in order to promote cross-program document compatibility? No. To quote Wikipedia, “Microsoft has discontinued enhancements to the RTF specification. New features in Word 2010 and later versions will not save properly to the RTF format.”¹

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rich_Text_Format&...

Upvoted for the attitude (of course MS's calls are entirely self-serving) but it's hard to know how much of a "failure" the Windows Store is - I tend to use it and recommend it as a safer-than-average port of call for the less skilled.

I would be willing to bet a non-zero amount of money that, much like the average Hacker News reader would woefully under-estimate how much .Net code is out there being written today, so to would we woefully underestimate how much usage the Microsoft Store gets.

I opened the Microsoft Store and had a look at the top 50 items in "most popular". It includes items with such mainstream appeal as the Windows Terminal, Ubuntu 20.04 and the VMWare client.

The most popular app is Roblox. It has 164 reviews. The second most popular app is Spotify. It has 57 reviews. On Android, it has 19 million reviews. Their Android TV app even has 200. The item with the most reviews is Minecraft, with 1000 reviews. On Android it has 3.5 million.

I think they only show reviews from people in your region. I can see 325 reviews on Spotify, 15k reviews on Minecraft.

The author of krita mentioned in this thread that their revenue is 50/50 steam and windows store, so it can't be that bad.

The Microsoft store also lets you install free apps with out logging in (if you keep clicking out from the login prompts) so it's probably also harder to get reviews.

While I agree that the windows store is used more than some people might think, it is used nowhere near as much as the Play or App Store are, and is nowhere near as import for Windows as the others are for their respective platforms.

Of course it is! For the vast majority of users, the Play or App Store is the only possible way to install software.

Of course the difficulty and headaches involved with windows package management are pretty asinine, they at least are an accessible and non-gated platform for both the developer and user, which can't be said for Android and iOS/MacOS.

It's probably higher than you think for consumers, mostly due to XBox/Minecraft.

Enterprises? Forget it.

Which is partly Microsoft's fault because Enterprises should have easily embraced the Microsoft Store for Business (emphasis on the "for Business" as a part of the name following one of Microsoft's more confusing name patterns; it's a separate more customizable "store front" than the "not for Business" consumer store): it's a lot nicer UX than System Center's "just ported from Silverlight" Vista-era ugliness, has more features than System Center (including easier license management for applications sold on the non-Business store), and better install technology. In one of Microsoft's many "forgot to build a bridge" problems with the Store, they forgot to provide easy upgrades from System Center, especially for the then (too many) companies still supporting Windows 7 side-by-side Windows 10 installs up until the security support deadline.

It's probably still too early to tell, but App Management for Microsoft Teams, updates to MSIX, and better Windows 7 compatibility for companies over-paying EOL extended security support agreements, at least for Microsoft/Office 365 companies, has opened the door to enterprises re-evaluating the Microsoft Store for Business. It might actually replace System Center like it was intended to, just years late.

I imagine the Windows Store gets billions in revenue, but much like Microsoft's claims about the great success of their cloud offering (where they hilariously count Office 365 as cloud revenue to compare against AWS and GCC) the overwhelming bulk will be people upgrading to paid Office accounts.

The .NET bit is an irrelevant strawman. We aren't talking about that, and it has zero relevance.

The Windows App Store is a sad disaster.

i wouldn't call it a failure i actually bought a couple of apps and I don't usually buy apps (in the past 5-6 years I think i bought another 3 on play store). its just that windows app delivery is traditionally done via application's website so it never took off especially cause at first it only catered for UWP stuff.

I don't necessarily disagree with your analysis of Microsoft's motivation. However, it does nothing to change my support of it. The 30% Apple takes for its App Store seem a bit much for a middle man.

Compared to what industry? Retail and the wholesaler? The Kindle? Google Play? Steam? Spotify?

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