Microsoft Taught Apple Nothing
world.hey.com
world.hey.com
> But Microsoft’s brutish tactics also managed to turn an entire generation of developers against them. And the bill for that didn’t come due until Windows Phone. Nobody, and I mean nobody, wanted to lift a finger to help Microsoft gain a foothold in mobile. The wounds from the late 90s and early 2000s were still fresh in many developers minds. So many cheered as Apple went from underdog, favored by developers for their embrace of Unix roots in their operating system, to the dominant player on a new platform.
I was there. The only reasons for not building for Windows Phone for me were (1) they were very late and not very serious, (2) the development kit was similar (but incompatible) with their desktop target. The platform itself ran great on top notch Nokia hardware with live tiles long before iPhone ever got around to it (or Android showing the actual time on the Clock icon).
MS should have tried harder, but they were too blind to recognize a new market. Can't say that's true for Apple they're creating Watch, Vision, Silicon, etc. I don't like Apple's business tactics, but I can't say they're bad at it.
I also think that in general when people claim that "developers remembered," they are overestimating how much people actually remember and act upon that. Of course, there will be examples of people who held the grudge against MS and never did any development for them. But most people don't have such strong feelings after time has passed. Also, the developer pool is not static and younger developers are unlikely to have universally strong opinion about individual companies based on the past behavior. Recently a friend complained to me that the younger generation does not understand the gravity of 9/11. I pointed out to him that most of the kids he was complaining about were not even born in 2001.
Apple has consistently chosen to stop supporting old chips when they upgrade MacOS so they can take advantage of new features in the hardware. Microsoft hasn't done this in years, but when they finally did people get indignant (I sure got voted down a bit more than a year ago when I said I was planning to "build a machine which could run Windows 11")
With MacOS I was in the strange situation that I felt like I was not being treated like an adult because Safari would not display WebP files on my old mac because, presumably, Apple engineers couldn't be bothered to write a WebP decoder that uses the latest SIMD instructions. (Like, "aren't file formats a userspace thing that has nothing to do with the OS?")
The flip side is that Windows just doesn't use those SIMD instructions so it performs a lot worse than it could perform.
Part of Intel's crisis is that it's model of rolling out new features is terribly broken, when something like AVX-512 comes out, it will quickly be adopted by the national labs, Facebook and other hyperscalers, but most software vendors won't touch it because most of the machines people use won't support it for 10 years. Apple's M1 and M2 chips are fundamentally powerful but they have a really unfair advantage over x86 because the pipeline between adding new features in x86 and really using them is completely broken in Wintel land. Thus when we have x86 chips we (and/or Intel's shareholders, employees, vendors, etc.) are paying top dollar for features that we don't really use.
The best thing M$ ever did was add WSL2 to the OS. Now, if they could just get rid of the rest of the operating system, I'd consider switching back. Here are a few other things they might consider ditching if they want "my vote" - like they care:
- The registry - File locking of every dang file (so, you know, just reboot) - Horrible system of "installing" an app - Warnings that pup up full screen. Where is my baseball bat? - Backslash in filename. Backslashes are for escaping characters - Clippy (oh, wait they already got rid of that??) - Forced reboots twice weekly - The entire concept of "Did you reboot it??"