Former Softie, worked in Windows for 9 years from Vista to Win8, mostly on the Shell and UI platform teams. For Vista and half of Win7 development, I was the PM

Former Softie, worked in Windows for 9 years from Vista to Win8, mostly on the Shell and UI platform teams. For Vista and half of Win7 development, I was the PM owner for our UI platform (comctl32, DirectUI, Visual Styling, and High DPI). This is my opinion, I don't speak for the company - During my time there, I did not see any anti-competitive practices the author is speaking of. Those days are long gone. I know first hand we were committed to compatibility and growth of the platform, new and old. That being said, it's clear that building on Win32 is painful and not cheap. Win32 is great if you want direct system access and complete control over everything, up and down the stack. This works well for large enterprise applications and games. The tradeoff here is that you must roll your own everything and work hard not to do stupid shit. During the Vista days, we saw that the Windows app ecosystem was struggling because we didn't have a good platform story. You had to choose between Win32 and .NET. If you're a native developer, it was Win32. Win32 didn't provide a great app and UI framework (have you ever tried to owner draw a control or do fluid layout?). This is why many app developers during that time built their own app and UI framework, used MFC or leveraged a 3rd party framework. I was only familiar with the app platform so I can't speak to the options for building a game. I'm sure it was limited as well. Microsoft introduced many platforms since Vista - WPF, Silverlight, XNA, Win8 Apps (Windows XAML and WinJS), and UWP. I'm sure there are more :) Even with all of those new platforms in the mix, Win32 is still alive and well. I believe UWP is a huge win for developers. You don't need to roll your own everything. For the companies that want complete control, Win32 is still there. It is true that certain things are only available to UWP developers. There is no malicious intent, it's really only about priorities. The new thing comes first. The developer community needs to speak up if they want something. Microsoft will listen.