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Comment by kklimonda | Hacker News Reader

Ok, just to be sure I understand that correctly - Microsoft has invested quite a lot of money into developing Silverlight and WPF and then promoting those technologies among developers as the best thing since sliced bread (not to mention the only way to write applications for WP7) and now they are doing that? How is that for the coherent vision and a clear message to people who'd like to write for their platform?

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It gets worse - Silverlight is now the development story for WP7 while HTML/JS seems to be the premier way to write apps for Win8 (though I assume there'll be a way to get SL/C++ working with the new stuff - I'll be stunned if there wasn't).

After almost two decades of Win32 being the best way to write apps across the Windows platform, that has been upended in a year or so. That's a big deal. But we now have two competing stacks on the phone vs tablets/PCs which can't be a good place to be.

Disclaimer - I know no inside details of Win8 UI/development platform plans from my time at MSFT.

Microsoft invest lots of money into lots of different technologies, then dump them later. OLE, COM, Win16/32 and many many others have fallen by the wayside over the years.

Another good examples is connecting to a database on the MS stack, so many different ways of doing it.

The canonical example, in fact. They've gone through something like 10 different APIs/frameworks in the last decade, IIRC.

All of the above are still used pretty heavily, even by new work coming out of MS.

You're RIGHT though, it's just the examples aren't so good. In recent memory: WPF, Windows Forms, MFC, .NET Remoting, DCOM...

They actually had a session at a recent dev conference (I saw the video) where they told you all about the underwhelming list of new features coming in WPF. The main message: WPF isn't dead! But it made things pretty obvious.

The trouble with a company the size of Microsoft is that there are so many people creating so much STUFF that it's nearly impossible for them all to work together. It may be better for them, as a company, to allow their various branches to function independently while exposing an inconsistent API story to the outside world. The alternative would be to make everybody talk to everybody else, causing all work to come to a grinding halt.

Microsoft has done that with every new version of windows. If you're looking at writing a media capture routine then there's one api for windows xp, one for vista, one for 2k, ...

I agree it's absolutely ridiculous. Supporting HTML/JS and being "open" might sound like a good idea but all it's going to do is turn former Win32/WinForms/WPF/Silverlight devs over to HTML/JS which then they'll lose a platform lock on as they'll migrate over to Macs. Good job Microsoft and good luck with that stock price.

So, if MS stayed focused on their traditional APIs, developers complain that they only care about proprietary technologies, but if they adopt HTML5+JS, they'll lose developers? Explain to me how that makes sense.

HTML5+JS will still be Windows only.

Just like Cocoa is Mac OS X only. It's for developing native apps. The point is that MS is using open specifications as the centerpiece of their new platform.

In which case it's even worse. HTML5+JS is great, but aggravating enough that I'd still spring for a native API if I had the choice.

The goal of a company is to make as much money as possible. If you want to get people to develop for your OS over another OS you have to give them an incentive to do so. Using a cross-platform API disincentives one to only develop for Windows as now the benefits to using platform specific technologies available only to Windows has been marginalized.

If they're going for lowest common denominator apis like HTML/JS, then you get subpar LCD applications that Apple can blow away via better support in native apps and Apple OS specific APIs for Objective-C/XCode. Windows devs will then feel like they can do better than HTML/JS and move over to Objective-C/XCode and Apple.

In fact I'm strongly considering moving to the Apple camp after being a long time staunch MS supporter for my entire career.

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