.NET has a very good inter-op story for win32. If you started with MFC, WPF, or another framework and then needed to add win32 flourishes you can do so quite e

.NET has a very good inter-op story for win32. If you started with MFC, WPF, or another framework and then needed to add win32 flourishes you can do so quite easily. It's quite a different thing to try and retrofit a traditional win32 message pump application with one of these frameworks. Especially if it's in an entirely different language and runtime. Had Office been born in the early 2000s its quite likely they would have tried to use .NET and had the same issues as Longhorn. I think Microsoft did have broad ambitions for the framework, but reality was the tech couldn't handle large scale software at that time and Longhorn failed as a result. I think your right it is a little unfortunate win32 is needed if you want to make a million LOC desktop application. I don't think there really was anything better for native code up until recently with modern C++. The ugliness of COM and MFC are really due to limitations of C and C++ at the time. Now I don't think there is enough demand to really justify something radical. .NET Always did reasonably well for web backends, and I think they have the right strategy to keep pushing there.