Comment by LeifCarrotson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LeifCarrotson | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

"Some bifurcation" is quite an understatement!

Unless you're trying to partition all actions into "good" and "bad", it's more like octofurcation or dodecafurcation. Microsoft is not a homogenous monolith...what does it even mean to split something that's already split apart?

Here's an old org chart which shows Microsoft trifurcated:

https://i.insider.com/4e0b340dcadcbbdd35120000

But realistically, each of 5 divisions - Windows, Office, Server & Tools, Online Services, and Entertainment & Devices (the above chart may have been made before the latter two existed) - has a president that's trying to make their division successful, even at the expense of goodwill earned by other divisions. Yes, Server & Tools has been knocking it out of the park for you and I recently with regards to developer enthusiasm, but they're a long ways away from Entertainment & Devices. Each of those divisions actually has another ~25 VPs and hundreds of Directors each trying to climb the ladder faster than the others.

To put it bluntly, Windows is jealous of all the post-sale revenue that Entertainment & Devices gets, and all the telemetry that online services gets, and has shoved as much as possible of both into Windows 11.

I must admit Windows just doesn't know what they are supposed to do.

UWP, .NET Native and C++/CX just tanked due to their mismanagement, and having burned the few believers with what are now about 5 rewrites since Windows 8 was introduced plus having dropped the .NET Native and C++/CX toolchains.

Forget about.WinUI 3.0, it is so messed up that Windows 11 still needs to rely on UWP and WinUI 2.x, despite being "deprecated".

Then we have tons of GUI tooling PMs, each selling their own stack, and every couple of months the faces on community calls keep changing.

There are surely some big fires happening in. Redmond and they keep carrying water buckets hoping to make it right.

Specially since it appears the lack of love between WinDev and DevDiv never went away.

The forces that won over Longhorn have managed to completely mess up WinRT and aren't doing any better with the Project Reunion endeavours.

Anyone that is bored during the season festivities can browse the GitHub issues for WinUI, AppSDK, cppwinrt and a bunch of other ones connected to them.

It makes me think of the disaster of the Linux desktop and X Windows.

The first thing you notice about Linux is all the different widget sets that clash with each other such as Motif, Lesstif, tk, gtk, qt, fltk, wxWidgets and many more. They all seem to be in a competition to look worse than all of the competitors. They also seem to share the belief that "font metrics don't matter" and be completely indifferent if labels burst out of their space.

Microsoft has gone through almost as many widget sets for Windows. Muggles don't notice, but if you are a dev or learn to be observant you might realize that you are using 8 different widget sets in a given day. Microsoft has so often seemed to be 90 or 180 degrees behind phase with the rest of the world: I remember that awful time in the early 00's that theming widget sets was a fad and the program that ran your scanner was in a competition with similar programs to look uglier than the others, such as

https://mercy-evs.com/back-orifice-2000-78/

Then they came out with WPF which had wonderful support for theming but everybody was burned out from theming and nobody used it.

At least in Windows Vista Microsoft made the transition to the GPU first WDDM rendering model. In linux every decade is going to be the decade of Wayland but it will never actually happen, which is sad.

I have to agree, despite my occasional pro-Windows comments.

Here are two more nice pieces, despite VS being a WPF application, the team that owns the installer decided it was a great idea to rewrite it in Electron.

And C++/WinRT tooling is so back to the 90's that even using MFC feels more fun. Apparently no one in WinDev can afford C++ Builder or Qt licenses to get how pre-historic they live.

So we get Forms, WPF, WinUI/UWP and WinUI/Win32, MAUI and then Blazor not happy with WebAssembly also tries to sell itself as Electron replacement on top of all those stacks via WebWidgets.

Clearly the cat has left the house and the mice don't know what to do.

At least some sanity prevailed and the VS installer is now a WPF app.

Blazor on the desktop is a bit of a head scratcher.

> At least some sanity prevailed and the VS installer is now a WPF app.

It is an Electron app, check its use of nodejs when running it.

Whic makes me think if Microsoft can’t be bothered with their own frameworks why should I.

Sorry I don't have a better source for this:

https://twitter.com/mrhestew/status/1369356955009966080

And just looking at the installer in Process Explorer, it is now a single process that does not load any Chromium or Node DLLs.

I stand corrected.

I had just accepted the Electron rewrite as fact of life and never bothered again to check its process information.

I really missed that info, thanks.

That said I think Windows is still the market leader and better than the others. I don't know much about the story of MacOS but I doubt it's that different. I have a mac right next to me, my wife uses it to read her email, I use it to test web sites on Safari, and I can't say it is any better than the Windows machine I use.

The finder is OK but many of the built-in apps like iTunes are "absolute p00p" and seem to drive away good competitive software.

For the last twenty years Cocoa has been the UI framework for macOS with a transition to SwiftUI starting a couple of years ago.

Apple has definitely been more consistent on this front.

That is the thing, it is the lesser evil on desktop tooling, however WinDev is trying really hard to make it no longer be the case.

> And C++/WinRT tooling is so back to the 90's that even using MFC feels more fun.

I work on a large MFC project and it's still a surprisingly nice way to develop desktop applications. It's fast, old, and stable.

Using some of the newer Windows APIs in MFC can be painful though (e.g. XAML Islands).

For anyone starting on C++/WinRT today without major Windows background, I would just recommend them to read a book on ATL from early 2000, most of the tooling is the same, this is how "modern" it feels like.

Former believer here. Fucking done.

I currently work at Microsoft, and all I can say is that I actually have so much respect for CEOs lately. It takes a huge amount of foresight and understanding of human nature to move a company this size in the right direction, because you’re trying to incentivize all these divisions to behave the way you intend. As I’ve become more experienced I’ve learned that company culture is way more important than I thought when I first graduated college.

> the right direction

I used to have a great relationship with Microsoft. I gave them money, they gave me software and went away (patches aside). Now they want to monitor me and advertise to me. It's fairly sad. And certainly not what I would call the right direction.

Every now and then when I get silly thoughts about Microsoft as such (as opposed to just very specific divisions) being "on the right direction", I recall that LinkedIn is under MS ownership.

It’s not that LinkedIn is bad; it’s a trackfire if dark patterns and has been getting worse since acquisition.

This is a great point- I dramatically oversimplified what is going on. I do wonder how this is discussed internally. Since I started working as a dev back in the late 90s I feel like a lot of the optimism I had from tech improving our lives has largely been erased. Its probably just me getting old and pessimistic though :).

> a lot of the optimism I had from tech improving our lives has largely been erased

It can do both, and we should strive to both prevent it from degrading our lives, and make it improve them. That's the original purpose of our computers. This should drive us. It drives me. I'd say this is critically important.

Please try to do the right things, whoever reads this. Computer scientists are powerful and impactful. Please reflect on how and what you (and whoever pays you) spend your time on, how it impacts society and human beings (and beyond) and make sure your are at ease with what you come up with, whatever the scale of the impact is. Don't lie to yourself. This paragraph should not be painful to read.

FYI Gaming is it's own Org from the top now :)

I really respect the decisions lately within Gaming but there have been some really disappointing changes in other spaces like Windows.

My experience has been their right arm doesn’t talk to the left. Still mostly good people inside. Except for some enterprise sales.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com