Hacker News Reader

Comment by randallu | Hacker News Reader

So they ended up doing (what sounds like, or may as well be) a complete rewrite and it's taking them much longer than they expected? Shocker!

It sounds like they're running the WP7 apps in a compatibility box. Is that right? One issue developing for Android is the huge API sprawl. Android has this immense surface area of public API now, and they only add new methods and classes every release (I'd love to know how the framework engineers on Android feel about this, because it certainly detracts from the app development experience...). So a compatibility box sounds like a good idea in that case, though making everyone rewrite their apps isn't a good idea...

View on HN

In order to use WP8-specific features, developers will need to use a new development model. This is more friction for developers when compared to using comparable new features in iOS or Android, where the development model is unchanged, but new APIs are utilized.

One can only imagine the sorts of bureaucratic infighting within Microsoft as various development tool factions seek to discard the work of factions falling out of favor. In contrast consider how long Apple stuck by Objective-C as its chief development framework.

> "In order to use WP8-specific features, developers will need to use a new development model. "

It's not only the WP8 model. Windows 8 has changed, Server 2012 has changed, and so on... I have so many new keys and downloads available at MSDN, I have to take time to plan what I want to load into a vitual machine and start testing against.

Apple hasn't really consistenly stuck by Objective-C; they tried to push people in the Java direction for OS X "Cocoa" development maybe about 10 years ago. Never really caught on, though.

I thought they didn't believe that people would actually use ObjC compared to newer managed languages (pretty safe bet IMO, but wrong in this case it turns out).

Actually now that I think about it the the Java stuff must date back to NeXT. Probably a strategy to sell into "the enterprise", which they were pretty hot on at one point.

Apple's engineering group is much smaller than Microsoft's (or probably anyone else's). What's the GDP per engineer at Apple vs any other product company (like MSFT, Google or Samsung)?

EDIT: Which is to say, I believe bureaucracy is more likely in larger organizations and that the scale of MSFT's engineering org makes it unmanageable.

IIRC I looked that up, and Google's revenue is about half of MS's for 1/3 the employees, making it about 3/2 the revenue per employee. Not sure about Apple/Samsung.

One could argue that Apple is rather fashion than product company.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com