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It was Steve Ballmer and Steven Sinofsky that killed Windows Phone. They killed it first by being late: Android released September 2008, Windows Phone was relea

It was Steve Ballmer and Steven Sinofsky that killed Windows Phone. They killed it first by being late: Android released September 2008, Windows Phone was released November 2010. Two years behind Android!! They killed it also by being not sufficiently differentiated. Then they also killed it with the bland Metro look & feel. Microsoft learned nothing from previous failures such as Zune. Microsoft has learned nothing from the failure of Windows Phone, and is now in the process of killing Windows. Yes, Windows 10 is pretty good, but as an app platform it is a failure. Even Microsoft products such as Teams and Azure Storage Explorer use Electron, not native Windows APIs. And why would any developer make native Windows apps? Ordinary users can't tell an app built using Electron from a native Windows app. Thanks to Metro and its bland flatness, Windows apps does not have a differentiated look & feel, so end users don't know to demand Windows native apps. So developers are better off using cross-platform technologies such as Electron. (Yes, Electron is bloated but if your application is substantial this is not a deal breaker.)

kitsunesoba 9y ago
I've had interest in writing native Windows (desktop) apps in the recent past, but the confusing messaging/lack of commitment to any particular direction was a real turnoff. On Apple platforms, the only real choice you make is between Swift and Objective-C because either way you'll be using Cocoa. Microsoft would do well to bring that sense of clarity to their dev scene.
- flukus 9y ago
  The other problem is that after they finally showed a direction (xaml/UWP) no backwards compatibility was offered, you had to choose between the now deprecated libraries and have an app that worked on windows 7+, or you could choose the new ones and have it only work on windows 10. Had UWP run on windows 7 we might have seen some more take-up.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    UWP cannot run on Windows 7 because it requires a container model, which I doubt they could just patch on Windows 7.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      They probably couldn't just port the patches, but there's no reason why they couldn't write a runtime environment on W7, even if it didn't provide the same security guarantees.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - WorldMaker 9y ago
    XAML/WPF is close enough to XAML/UWP that you could keep a codebase for both relatively clean and easy to support. (As someone that had to do a bunch of work to maintain a codebase with both XAML/WPF and XAML/Silverlight front-ends, I have very little sympathy to give to anyone that thinks otherwise.) These days it's getting even easier with Xamarin adding support for WPF, but even without that sort of hand-holding there have always been options. XAML/WPF is much better than "no backwards compatibility" if you needed to support a UWP-first application on Windows 7. Certainly there were more issues moving the other direction, but particularly/mostly if you had skipped architecting for Silverlight as an intermediate step.
- tzs 9y ago
  > I've had interest in writing native Windows (desktop) apps in the recent past, but the confusing messaging/lack of commitment to any particular direction was a real turnoff. Seconded. The previous times I wanted/needed to do Windows development, the first step was ridiculously simple: BUY book FROM bookstore WHERE author = 'Charles Petzold' AND title CONTAINS 'Programming Windows' ORDER BY publication_date DESC LIMIT 1 Heck, that even worked when I briefly thought I'd need to do some OS/2 programming. Just change 'Programming Windows' to 'OS/2 Presentation Manager'. Nowadays, that gives "Programming Windows Sixth Edition", from 2013, which "focuses exclusively on writing Windows Store applications", for Windows 8, almost always in XAML and C#. He says that "Plenty of other books already exist for writing Win32 desktop applications, including the 5th edition of Programming Windows. I’ll occasionally make reference to Win32 API and desktop applications, but this book is really all about writing new Windows 8 applications". If I use this book, will it work for Windows 10 also? Are these applications only distributable via the Windows Store or can I host them for download from anywhere? If I want to distribute an application through the Windows Store does it have to be this type, or can I also distribute Win32 desktop applications via the store? I have one specific application I miss from my old 3rd generation iPad that I have not found a good equivalent for on my Surface Pro 4, and so would like to write it myself, but I have not found a clear explanation of just what my options are, so have not started.
0x4f3759df 9y ago
It seems that Microsoft's moat is shrinking. If people don't develop Windows native applications, then what is the power of the Windows Operating System as Business Moat? It seems like their future is Windows Azure or bust.
- shrewduser 9y ago
  they still have their office powerhouse for now
  - ccozan 9y ago
    and the corporate. Windows will not dissapear so soon from corporate desktops.
- sah2ed 9y ago
  No it's not shrinking just yet although they clearly don't see Windows as a cash cow like you are suggesting. Their moat is in having diversified but complementary business units. Microsoft made $21bn on $90bn in revenues [1] and the stock market responded by sending the stock to an all-time high of ~$74 [2]. Microsoft is still a very healthy business and will remain so for a while. [1] https://www.recode.net/2017/7/21/16008618/microsoft-all-time-stock-price-chart https://www.recode.net/2017/7/21/16008618/microsoft-all-time... [2] https://www.google.com/finance?cid=358464 https://www.google.com/finance?cid=358464
arjo1 9y ago
Its a pity because UWP is really a pleasure to work with. Its even faster to develop uwp apps than websites...
- roryisok 9y ago
  so true. and you can develop in js/html if you want. good for small stuff
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mhomde 9y ago
Well one reason to build native UWP apps is that you do animation on the composition layer, thus ensuring 60 fps. It makes quite a difference in the feeling of animated UI, side menus etc. I agree though that app stores for desktop apps, seems to be the case for OS X as well. Not quiet sure why.
pjmlp 9y ago
> And why would any developer make native Windows apps? For the same customers that require WPF/Windows Forms nowadays, and there are tons of them in industrial settings. Their Windows XP and Windows 7 computers won't last forever, but they still need to plug hardware devices, OS specific APIs, and COM based drivers into their native apps.
nailer 9y ago
Zune and WP were about five years ahead of the trend in digital first design. They're more minimal that what we have now (flat backgrounds not subtle gradients) but we're still far ahead of pre version 4 Android.
roryisok 9y ago
> Even Microsoft products such as Teams and Azure Storage Explorer use Electron, not native Windows APIs. You forgot the big one, Visual Studio Code - a runaway success, and an electron app. The reason they don't build these as UWP apps is because they are cross-platform. UWP is currently only available on Windows, and they want VSCode etc to run on MacOS and Linux. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they bring the UWP platform to MacOS and Linux in the near future. It makes perfect sense (apart from the name, but MS is no stranger to renaming things) > Ordinary users can't tell an app built using Electron from a native Windows app. Thanks to Metro and its bland flatness, Windows apps does not have a differentiated look & feel, so end users don't know to demand Windows native apps. I'm really not sure what you mean here. Metro is bland and flat if you design your app that way, and a lot of people design electron apps specifically "flat" to avoid them looking like a particular OS. android and ios apps look like this, I think its just a natural trend of the software / UI industry that apps are starting to look homogenous. I personally don't like it though. I like file menus like old school forms apps. If that's what you mean then I agree. > So developers are better off using cross-platform technologies such as Electron. Not for design reasons!
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  «I wouldn't be at all surprised if they bring the UWP platform to MacOS and Linux in the near future.» Xamarin announced support for Linux and macOS at BUILD, and from what I hear most of the work is fairly far along (on GitHub). So if Xamarin is the "React Native" to the UWP's C#/XAML platform, Electron and Cordova are still useful cross-platform runtimes for the UWP's JS/HTML stack. I think the messaging from Microsoft seems pretty clear that web-based apps of all sorts (PWAs, Electron, Cordova, UWP JS/HTML, etc) are still welcome on Windows as "first-class" apps and that it's up to team productivity and preference which platform to use. It shouldn't be a surprise to see a bunch of Microsoft-built Electron apps now, because JS/HTML has always been in the UWP "big tent". (There has even been some cool work done to bring more of the Electron apps more directly into UWP containers, and making them more directly first class UWP citizens, and I hope that work continues.)

kitsunesoba 9y ago

I've had interest in writing native Windows (desktop) apps in the recent past, but the confusing messaging/lack of commitment to any particular direction was a real turnoff. On Apple platforms, the only real choice you make is between Swift and Objective-C because either way you'll be using Cocoa. Microsoft would do well to bring that sense of clarity to their dev scene.

flukus 9y ago
The other problem is that after they finally showed a direction (xaml/UWP) no backwards compatibility was offered, you had to choose between the now deprecated libraries and have an app that worked on windows 7+, or you could choose the new ones and have it only work on windows 10. Had UWP run on windows 7 we might have seen some more take-up.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  UWP cannot run on Windows 7 because it requires a container model, which I doubt they could just patch on Windows 7.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    They probably couldn't just port the patches, but there's no reason why they couldn't write a runtime environment on W7, even if it didn't provide the same security guarantees.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  XAML/WPF is close enough to XAML/UWP that you could keep a codebase for both relatively clean and easy to support. (As someone that had to do a bunch of work to maintain a codebase with both XAML/WPF and XAML/Silverlight front-ends, I have very little sympathy to give to anyone that thinks otherwise.) These days it's getting even easier with Xamarin adding support for WPF, but even without that sort of hand-holding there have always been options. XAML/WPF is much better than "no backwards compatibility" if you needed to support a UWP-first application on Windows 7. Certainly there were more issues moving the other direction, but particularly/mostly if you had skipped architecting for Silverlight as an intermediate step.
tzs 9y ago
> I've had interest in writing native Windows (desktop) apps in the recent past, but the confusing messaging/lack of commitment to any particular direction was a real turnoff. Seconded. The previous times I wanted/needed to do Windows development, the first step was ridiculously simple: BUY book FROM bookstore WHERE author = 'Charles Petzold' AND title CONTAINS 'Programming Windows' ORDER BY publication_date DESC LIMIT 1 Heck, that even worked when I briefly thought I'd need to do some OS/2 programming. Just change 'Programming Windows' to 'OS/2 Presentation Manager'. Nowadays, that gives "Programming Windows Sixth Edition", from 2013, which "focuses exclusively on writing Windows Store applications", for Windows 8, almost always in XAML and C#. He says that "Plenty of other books already exist for writing Win32 desktop applications, including the 5th edition of Programming Windows. I’ll occasionally make reference to Win32 API and desktop applications, but this book is really all about writing new Windows 8 applications". If I use this book, will it work for Windows 10 also? Are these applications only distributable via the Windows Store or can I host them for download from anywhere? If I want to distribute an application through the Windows Store does it have to be this type, or can I also distribute Win32 desktop applications via the store? I have one specific application I miss from my old 3rd generation iPad that I have not found a good equivalent for on my Surface Pro 4, and so would like to write it myself, but I have not found a clear explanation of just what my options are, so have not started.

0x4f3759df 9y ago

It seems that Microsoft's moat is shrinking. If people don't develop Windows native applications, then what is the power of the Windows Operating System as Business Moat? It seems like their future is Windows Azure or bust.

shrewduser 9y ago
they still have their office powerhouse for now
- ccozan 9y ago
  and the corporate. Windows will not dissapear so soon from corporate desktops.
sah2ed 9y ago
No it's not shrinking just yet although they clearly don't see Windows as a cash cow like you are suggesting. Their moat is in having diversified but complementary business units. Microsoft made $21bn on $90bn in revenues [1] and the stock market responded by sending the stock to an all-time high of ~$74 [2]. Microsoft is still a very healthy business and will remain so for a while. [1] https://www.recode.net/2017/7/21/16008618/microsoft-all-time-stock-price-chart https://www.recode.net/2017/7/21/16008618/microsoft-all-time... [2] https://www.google.com/finance?cid=358464 https://www.google.com/finance?cid=358464

arjo1 9y ago

Its a pity because UWP is really a pleasure to work with. Its even faster to develop uwp apps than websites...

roryisok 9y ago
so true. and you can develop in js/html if you want. good for small stuff

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

mhomde 9y ago

Well one reason to build native UWP apps is that you do animation on the composition layer, thus ensuring 60 fps. It makes quite a difference in the feeling of animated UI, side menus etc. I agree though that app stores for desktop apps, seems to be the case for OS X as well. Not quiet sure why.

pjmlp 9y ago

> And why would any developer make native Windows apps? For the same customers that require WPF/Windows Forms nowadays, and there are tons of them in industrial settings. Their Windows XP and Windows 7 computers won't last forever, but they still need to plug hardware devices, OS specific APIs, and COM based drivers into their native apps.

nailer 9y ago

Zune and WP were about five years ahead of the trend in digital first design. They're more minimal that what we have now (flat backgrounds not subtle gradients) but we're still far ahead of pre version 4 Android.

roryisok 9y ago

> Even Microsoft products such as Teams and Azure Storage Explorer use Electron, not native Windows APIs. You forgot the big one, Visual Studio Code - a runaway success, and an electron app. The reason they don't build these as UWP apps is because they are cross-platform. UWP is currently only available on Windows, and they want VSCode etc to run on MacOS and Linux. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they bring the UWP platform to MacOS and Linux in the near future. It makes perfect sense (apart from the name, but MS is no stranger to renaming things) > Ordinary users can't tell an app built using Electron from a native Windows app. Thanks to Metro and its bland flatness, Windows apps does not have a differentiated look & feel, so end users don't know to demand Windows native apps. I'm really not sure what you mean here. Metro is bland and flat if you design your app that way, and a lot of people design electron apps specifically "flat" to avoid them looking like a particular OS. android and ios apps look like this, I think its just a natural trend of the software / UI industry that apps are starting to look homogenous. I personally don't like it though. I like file menus like old school forms apps. If that's what you mean then I agree. > So developers are better off using cross-platform technologies such as Electron. Not for design reasons!

WorldMaker 9y ago
«I wouldn't be at all surprised if they bring the UWP platform to MacOS and Linux in the near future.» Xamarin announced support for Linux and macOS at BUILD, and from what I hear most of the work is fairly far along (on GitHub). So if Xamarin is the "React Native" to the UWP's C#/XAML platform, Electron and Cordova are still useful cross-platform runtimes for the UWP's JS/HTML stack. I think the messaging from Microsoft seems pretty clear that web-based apps of all sorts (PWAs, Electron, Cordova, UWP JS/HTML, etc) are still welcome on Windows as "first-class" apps and that it's up to team productivity and preference which platform to use. It shouldn't be a surprise to see a bunch of Microsoft-built Electron apps now, because JS/HTML has always been in the UWP "big tent". (There has even been some cool work done to bring more of the Electron apps more directly into UWP containers, and making them more directly first class UWP citizens, and I hope that work continues.)