5 ms·

Microsoft has their own share of stories abandoning the developers. Remember Silverlight?

tapoxi 7y ago
A better (worse?) story is Windows Mobile 6.5, Windows Phone 7, Windows Phone 8, and Windows 10 Mobile all being completely different, incompatible platforms that deprecated the prior one, before they decided to give up and use Android.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  And yet UWP still lives on, and is being improved to be independent of the actual Window 10 version, and to have Win32 and UWP on the same process.
- gamblor956 7y ago
  Not comparable. Microsoft stopped selling phones with those systems long before they stopped supporting them. They didn't just "turn off the servers" on those devices like Google has done with Nest. My old WM 6.5 phone still worked the last time I played with it.
  - tapoxi 7y ago
    That's true, a better Microsoft analogue would be the Kin.
    - gamblor956 7y ago
      I don't see how the Kin is comparable. It was killed after just 2 months by both Microsoft and Verizon (it's exclusive sales partner) due to poor sales. Microsoft and/or Verizon also offered full refunds to the dozen people who purchased the device after MS announced it would be shutting down the Kin servers.
      - WorldMaker 7y ago
        The Kin was also the result of an acquihire situation and contractual obligations to release the product from the acquired firm.
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    Plus, there was a direct migration path at each phase. Someone doing .NET CF apps on WM 6.5 shouldn't have had that many problems converting their WinForms-ish mobile UI to WP7's Silverlight-flavored XAML, and the XAML differences between WP7, WP8, and WP10 seem all relatively minor compared to the overall compatibility base of the underlying .NET CF to "Silverlight" .NET "CF2" to proto-UWP .NET to UWP .NET. So many of the problems in those transitions were UX "best practices" changes and not anything technical. I know a lot of developers had problems at each step of that migration curve and that it wasn't as smooth in reality as it should have been (and was on paper), but calling each transition a reboot or a restart (or "completely different, incompatible") doesn't make sense when so many of the moving parts were the same and backward compatible with each other.
echelon 7y ago
Ballmer was an ineffective leader, and he's gone now.
delecti 7y ago
The final release of Silverlight was 7 years after they announced deprecating it. MS supports products they've killed better than Google supports many products they haven't.
- mthoms 7y ago
  > MS supports products they've killed better than Google supports many products they haven't. Well put. I'm no MS fan but this rings very true.
  - tabtab 7y ago
    I do have to give MS credit for mostly supporting deprecated products. I do think they should have open-sourced VB-classic and FoxPro. They pissed off a lot of organizations by outright ending any future progress. There were some proprietary or "sensitive" parts in the code base, but they could have documented and replaced those modules with low-performance or filler stubs, and let the open-source community rework those parts. (Note those products still run in Windows 10, the last I heard.) Google will have a hard sell for "enterprise" tools if they keep pulling the plugs. Rewriting custom built applications into non-deprecated platforms is expensive.
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      Microsoft didn't see a disconnect between "VB Classic" and "VB.NET" like so many users did. They continued the version numbers straight across (the first VB.NET was version 7; it's currently at 16). They didn't feel they outright "ended" future progress, they felt they evolved the platform organically and at least to some extent were confused when users didn't follow along. Microsoft followed the confusion by providing increasingly more migration tools and assists (many of which you can still find online, even if some of the worst mistakes of their WinForms 1.0 era code is uncorrected). (I don't know if a similar reasoning exists behind encouraged migrations from FoxPro to Access, but I'd imagine that given how very long Access supported FoxPro imports and databases, there's probably a similar sentiment inside those parts of Microsoft.) Those kind of compatibility break/evolutionary steps are always hard, and Microsoft could always have handled them better, but seeing as how even open source continues to have the exact same problems (say the Python 2/3 debate or the Perl 5/6 stuff) it's hard to say that anyone in software has a good handle on this stuff. Microsoft at least seems to try every time to offer migration paths and assistance/help.
pjmlp 7y ago
Yes, eventually one will be able to migrate those apps into Blazor, thanks WebAssembly.

A better (worse?) story is Windows Mobile 6.5, Windows Phone 7, Windows Phone 8, and Windows 10 Mobile all being completely different, incompatible platforms that deprecated the prior one, before they decided to give up and use Android.

pjmlp 7y ago
And yet UWP still lives on, and is being improved to be independent of the actual Window 10 version, and to have Win32 and UWP on the same process.
gamblor956 7y ago
Not comparable. Microsoft stopped selling phones with those systems long before they stopped supporting them. They didn't just "turn off the servers" on those devices like Google has done with Nest. My old WM 6.5 phone still worked the last time I played with it.
- tapoxi 7y ago
  That's true, a better Microsoft analogue would be the Kin.
  - gamblor956 7y ago
    I don't see how the Kin is comparable. It was killed after just 2 months by both Microsoft and Verizon (it's exclusive sales partner) due to poor sales. Microsoft and/or Verizon also offered full refunds to the dozen people who purchased the device after MS announced it would be shutting down the Kin servers.
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      The Kin was also the result of an acquihire situation and contractual obligations to release the product from the acquired firm.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  Plus, there was a direct migration path at each phase. Someone doing .NET CF apps on WM 6.5 shouldn't have had that many problems converting their WinForms-ish mobile UI to WP7's Silverlight-flavored XAML, and the XAML differences between WP7, WP8, and WP10 seem all relatively minor compared to the overall compatibility base of the underlying .NET CF to "Silverlight" .NET "CF2" to proto-UWP .NET to UWP .NET. So many of the problems in those transitions were UX "best practices" changes and not anything technical. I know a lot of developers had problems at each step of that migration curve and that it wasn't as smooth in reality as it should have been (and was on paper), but calling each transition a reboot or a restart (or "completely different, incompatible") doesn't make sense when so many of the moving parts were the same and backward compatible with each other.

echelon 7y ago

Ballmer was an ineffective leader, and he's gone now.

delecti 7y ago

The final release of Silverlight was 7 years after they announced deprecating it. MS supports products they've killed better than Google supports many products they haven't.

mthoms 7y ago
> MS supports products they've killed better than Google supports many products they haven't. Well put. I'm no MS fan but this rings very true.
- tabtab 7y ago
  I do have to give MS credit for mostly supporting deprecated products. I do think they should have open-sourced VB-classic and FoxPro. They pissed off a lot of organizations by outright ending any future progress. There were some proprietary or "sensitive" parts in the code base, but they could have documented and replaced those modules with low-performance or filler stubs, and let the open-source community rework those parts. (Note those products still run in Windows 10, the last I heard.) Google will have a hard sell for "enterprise" tools if they keep pulling the plugs. Rewriting custom built applications into non-deprecated platforms is expensive.
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    Microsoft didn't see a disconnect between "VB Classic" and "VB.NET" like so many users did. They continued the version numbers straight across (the first VB.NET was version 7; it's currently at 16). They didn't feel they outright "ended" future progress, they felt they evolved the platform organically and at least to some extent were confused when users didn't follow along. Microsoft followed the confusion by providing increasingly more migration tools and assists (many of which you can still find online, even if some of the worst mistakes of their WinForms 1.0 era code is uncorrected). (I don't know if a similar reasoning exists behind encouraged migrations from FoxPro to Access, but I'd imagine that given how very long Access supported FoxPro imports and databases, there's probably a similar sentiment inside those parts of Microsoft.) Those kind of compatibility break/evolutionary steps are always hard, and Microsoft could always have handled them better, but seeing as how even open source continues to have the exact same problems (say the Python 2/3 debate or the Perl 5/6 stuff) it's hard to say that anyone in software has a good handle on this stuff. Microsoft at least seems to try every time to offer migration paths and assistance/help.

pjmlp 7y ago

Yes, eventually one will be able to migrate those apps into Blazor, thanks WebAssembly.