4 ms·

True but in terms of development platforms for Microsoft, it is constant churn. When they have a monopoly or near monopoly like Microsoft does with the desktop

True but in terms of development platforms for Microsoft, it is constant churn. When they have a monopoly or near monopoly like Microsoft does with the desktop and Windows, less need for churn to keep people on it but lack of competitors. Azure has gone through lots of churn because of heavy competition. Maybe competition, which is good, causes all this breaking software changes but change is good as well. Software change should just be a little more stable and developer/engineer/product/designer led not just the money/marketing/oversight pushed. Unfortunately standards get wrecked when platforms are going for lock-in and control, Microsoft/Google etc are all to blame for that. It isn't the engineers pushing for that mostly. Standards at least promote some level of stable APIs, but they don't lock-in and so big fish and sharks eat them up and break them.

arvinsim 7y ago
I find it curious that you left Apple out.
- drawkbox 7y ago
  Apple does similar. However Apple is greatly responsible for HTML5 and browsers today, as well as the handheld gaming revolution on mobile. Webkit, Canvas, SVG, OpenGL ES + WebGL (through Khronos sponsorship) and more were open sourced or pushed by Apple. Chrome/Safari basically every browser that is good came from Webkit and Apple opening that up. Granted that originally game from KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE but it exploded with Apple support. I left them out because they still have some grace left. Google and Microsoft squash standards and Microsoft is famous for "embrace, extend, extinguish" which Google now employs. Microsoft has been better recently but only because they lost developers during the Ballmer era and they have a desktop monopoly and their new OS is cloud where they are competitive with Azure so they are pushing standards more and cross platform to win back developers. Google is entering their Ballmer era currently. Apple doesn't have the power for that yet with developers, though they are not engineer/open focused typically and especially now in the COO era and have their own Ballmer vibe currently, but they are still riding on some fuel from Webkit, Canvas, SVG, HTML5, OpenGL ES + WebGL support which really helped handheld gaming and web gaming.

arvinsim 7y ago

I find it curious that you left Apple out.

drawkbox 7y ago
Apple does similar. However Apple is greatly responsible for HTML5 and browsers today, as well as the handheld gaming revolution on mobile. Webkit, Canvas, SVG, OpenGL ES + WebGL (through Khronos sponsorship) and more were open sourced or pushed by Apple. Chrome/Safari basically every browser that is good came from Webkit and Apple opening that up. Granted that originally game from KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE but it exploded with Apple support. I left them out because they still have some grace left. Google and Microsoft squash standards and Microsoft is famous for "embrace, extend, extinguish" which Google now employs. Microsoft has been better recently but only because they lost developers during the Ballmer era and they have a desktop monopoly and their new OS is cloud where they are competitive with Azure so they are pushing standards more and cross platform to win back developers. Google is entering their Ballmer era currently. Apple doesn't have the power for that yet with developers, though they are not engineer/open focused typically and especially now in the COO era and have their own Ballmer vibe currently, but they are still riding on some fuel from Webkit, Canvas, SVG, HTML5, OpenGL ES + WebGL support which really helped handheld gaming and web gaming.