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Comment by Fidelix | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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