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Comment by oaiey | Hacker News Reader

The answer to that is well known: Windows division builds WinUI/Win32 as their native C++/COM API, Office division went to React on their path to the web and the dev division fills gaps (WPF) and provides tools for external and internal devs (Maui for cross platform uis).

It is history not the lack of will. At one point the windows division was in shambles (remember vista) and WPF pops up. At another point, the windows and dev division have no answers to the office group (because you know who uses non win tech) so they went react. And then external devs screamed: where is the .net cross platform story so Microsoft acquired xamarin and later form Maui out of it.

It is history not lack of trust. But the outcome is the same: lackluster support for all UI toolkits.

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Well summarized, and just as shocking today as it was every minute while it developed.

Someone needs to remind those cats that they own the platform. Being able to sanely develop apps for and on that platform should be possible, and UI kinda-sorta matters for that. At a certain point with the MFC they had it dialled in, while pioneering asynchronous browser tech, with many best in class tools. Decades later with a cross-platform cloud-centric stack they have a shrug emoji as big and wide as the eyes can see, and no sense this basic question of development will ever get improved.

Ballmer chanting ‘developers, developers, developers …’ springs to mind.

Ballmer was not my favourite person to run MS, but that was a pretty good time to be a Windows developer if you bought in. Early Nadella days too. Now? It's too easy to find no MS answers for almost everything, even triple-A gaming is not the windows anchor it's been since they ran that doom demo

> but that was a pretty good time to be a Windows developer if you bought in

I did, it was great. Very apple-esque in a way. As long as you stayed in Microsoft's garden, you had a good time. Microsoft had, at the time, one of if not the most productive stack to build GUI desktop line of business apps. If your whole org was Microsoft from top to bottom, even better. AD auth in your desktop app in a couple of lines.

It was an expensive stack for sure, but I'd argue there's still nothing that has come close to it if you want to build an enterprise desktop app.

I understood (can not confirm it though) that the new start menu in Windows 11 was built using React Native, so yet another ui framework in the mix.

This feels a lot like the Linux desktop ecosystem where many apps have a different look and feel (GTK, Qt and a bunch of others).

Except for the fact that microsoft is one company.

> Windows division builds WinUI/Win32 as their native C++/COM API

Windows for many years is just a pile of different browser engines stashed one atop another running broken javascript/xml with react native on top.

At the bottom of everything is Sharepoint though.

As I understand it, Sinofsky is largely responsible for this mentality in the various places he worked across Microsoft: he instilled a distrust for anything originating out of other teams.

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