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Comment by fluoridation | Hacker News Reader

>Say what you will about Microsoft, but at least I can rely on their obsession with supporting outdated products.

Eh... I don't know about that. Their tech graveyard isn't as populous as Google's, but it's hardly empty. A few that come to mind: ATL, MFC, Silverlight, UWP.

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Besides Silverlight (which was supported all the way until the end of 2021!), you can still not only run but _write new applications_ using all of the listed technologies.

That doesn't constitute support when it comes to development platforms. They've not received any updates in years or decades. What they've done is simply not remove the capability build capability from the toolchains. That is, not even the work that would be required to no longer support them in any way. Compare that to C#, which has evolved rapidly over the same time period.

That's different from "killing" the product / technology, which is what Google does.

Only because they operate different businesses. Google is primarily a service provider. They have few software products that are not designed to integrate with their servers. Many of Microsoft's businesses work fundamentally differently. There's nothing Microsoft could do to Windows to disable all MFC applications and only MFC applications, and if there was it would involve more work than simply not doing anything else with MFC.

Not only has MFC been recently updated to support HiDPI, it is still the best Microsoft GUI C++ development experience on Visual C++.

And even if C++/CX and C++/WinRT aren't that great, with worse tooling than MFC and in maintenance mode, you can easilly create an application with them today.

Hardly the same can be told of most Google technologies.

Fair enough, I retract MFC as an example.

The business model doesn't matter.

I can write something with Microsoft tech and expect it with reasonable likelihood to work in 10 years (even their service-based stuff), but can't say the same about anything from Google.

That alone stops me/my org buying stuff from Google.

I'm not contending that Microsoft and Google are equivalent in this regard, I'm saying that Microsoft does have a history of releasing technologies and then letting them stagnate.

.NET Framework is the most egregious of the last few years.

You're absolutely right. I wasn't thinking about it when I wrote the comment, but I really should have included it. I'm still pissed about that, and I don't like how Core releases are deprecated in 1-2 years. For my personal projects that's a breakneck pace.

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