4 ms·

Sinofsky was pretty grounded in the early days but I've heard during the Windows 8 development he was burying his head in the sand, surrounding himself with yes

Sinofsky was pretty grounded in the early days but I've heard during the Windows 8 development he was burying his head in the sand, surrounding himself with yes-men and pretending like all (internal) feedback about the idiotic design was coming from people "afraid of change" (yes, literally replied that to someone that sent him honest feedback about the product). The folks that came up with the "remove the start button" design in Windows 8 where the same PMs & designers that came up with the Ribbon in Office; and he knew early feedback about the Ribbon was mostly negative and yet in a short time it became very popular; so he must've thought the same thing was happening with the start menu (but as we know now, it wasn't, it was just very bad design - not "ahead of its time", just broken and idiotic).

pjmlp 5y ago
Reading between the lines of enumerous blog posts, I think him and his yes man were also responsible for torpedoing Longhorn and replacing all .NET ideas with COM. So now we have to "enjoy" that since then all new APIs are COM based. It is going to take decades to undo this, if until then we don't move all into "Azure OS" and it stops being relevant.
- mavhc 5y ago
  Breaking everything now to maybe win in the future is not Microsoft's way. Their way is: Make a new thing, use the old thing to push the new thing.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    It wasn't their way, nowadays ask anyone burned with XNA, Managed DirectX, Silverlight, C++/CX, WinRT 8, UAP 8.1, UWP, WCF,.... how they feel about Microsoft support.
    - mavhc 5y ago
      Make a new thing, use the old thing to push the new thing. New thing fails, make a new new thing. So Managed DirectX was replaced with XNA. Silverlight was just MSFlash, although it used XAML which is still used today I assume. C++/CX was replaced with C++/WinRT WinRT the runtime started the sandboxing and ARM support path. What's UAP? UWP is still around, but again, no one cared because HTML5. And at least WCF is open source, although does anyone use it? At some point MS realised Windows wasn't important and moved to Azure.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Managed Direct X was replaced by an incompatible XNA, which was dropped on the floor, with the advice to learn C++ and move into DirectXTK. Silverlight was the app framework for Windows Phone 7 as well, dropped on the floor for Windows Phone 8. C++/CX was replaced by a junk framework that is basically ATL with a new name, with the same tooling as Visual C++ 6.0 with ATL. UAP was the percusor for UWP. The "compatibility story" goes like this. Windows 8 drops all compatibility with former Windows, but WinRT requires rewriting the application three times, for phone, tablet and desktop, due to the API space. Windows 8.1 improves the situation by introducing UAP, where the views still have to be written three times, but the API space for business logic can be shared. Requires a rewrite from previous WinRT. Windows 10 introduces UWP, as consolidation of three platforms, requires a rewrite from previous WinRT. XAML islands get introduced as bridge between Win32 and UWP, a year later plan gets dropped and WinUI 3.0 gets introduced, and Project Reunion. Yet another year ensues, WinUi is now merged with Project Reunion as the Windows App SDK. Requires yet another rewrite. In the middle of this, .NET Native gets dropped, and .NET 6 still doesn't provide the same AOT capabilities. On the C++ side, a group of devs manages to kill C++/CX without any equivalent tooling, telling everyone complaining that customers should suck it up and wait for the day ISO C++ supports Herb Sutter's metaclasses ideas, so that they don't do any C++ extensions like C++/CX or god forbid Qt and C++ Builder. Lots of enterprises stuck with .NET Framework use WCF. As for Azure OS, lets see what the future holds, it isn't the only cloud OS in town.
- int_19h 5y ago
  My biggest beef with Sinofsky is that he was apparently the one heavily pushing for JavaScript as a high-level ".NET replacement" for end-user apps running on top of all that COM API in Win8. So much effort spent on dev tooling around that, when it could have been spent on improving .NET instead.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Also I think WinFS would really have been a great idea. I'm sad it was cancelled.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Yes, Longhorn failed not due to technical issues, although yes there were quite a few of them. It failed because teams worked against each other making sure it wouldn't happen, instead of sorting out the issues in a collaborative manner. Joe Duffy mentions on his Rustconf keynote that even with Midori running in front of Windows team, they were asserting it wasn't possible to have such an OS.
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    To be fair, that’s precisely what Electron is, and Microsoft now uses it heavily. Mind you, they’re using Electron because they couldn’t make a .NET GUI framework live for more than two years. MAUI is due to die around 2025, mark my words.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      It is quite telling of the ongoing mess when Blazor steals the show, they keep talking about React Native for WinUI, and a third party (Uno) was able to deliver when Microsoft own teams can't. Also why on earth did they decided to go with Catalist for macOS, when everyone knows it is only good for porting iOS apps? I agree with the death expectation for MAUI.
easton 5y ago
This is what frustrates me about Microsoft sometimes. They try to stick to backwards compatibility as much as possible, then once in a while they decide to change something, usually do it not great (Windows 8), then they have to have a goodwill recovery period where they can’t break anything anymore. I think the backlash to 11’s changes means we’re probably stuck with the Windows 95 printer pane for another ten years. With the advent of high speed virtualization, it’s okay to break stuff (shoot, they tried it with XP Mode in 7, don’t know why they haven’t tried it again). I don’t know if we still need 20 years of compatibility.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
Oh yeah Win8 was such a big misstep. I really hated it and the server version which I still deal with sometimes today. I think Win11 is pretty good except for the fact that there's way too many old style settings dialogs left over, just like Win10. If it was actually consistent I'd love its design.

pjmlp 5y ago

Reading between the lines of enumerous blog posts, I think him and his yes man were also responsible for torpedoing Longhorn and replacing all .NET ideas with COM. So now we have to "enjoy" that since then all new APIs are COM based. It is going to take decades to undo this, if until then we don't move all into "Azure OS" and it stops being relevant.

mavhc 5y ago
Breaking everything now to maybe win in the future is not Microsoft's way. Their way is: Make a new thing, use the old thing to push the new thing.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  It wasn't their way, nowadays ask anyone burned with XNA, Managed DirectX, Silverlight, C++/CX, WinRT 8, UAP 8.1, UWP, WCF,.... how they feel about Microsoft support.
  - mavhc 5y ago
    Make a new thing, use the old thing to push the new thing. New thing fails, make a new new thing. So Managed DirectX was replaced with XNA. Silverlight was just MSFlash, although it used XAML which is still used today I assume. C++/CX was replaced with C++/WinRT WinRT the runtime started the sandboxing and ARM support path. What's UAP? UWP is still around, but again, no one cared because HTML5. And at least WCF is open source, although does anyone use it? At some point MS realised Windows wasn't important and moved to Azure.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Managed Direct X was replaced by an incompatible XNA, which was dropped on the floor, with the advice to learn C++ and move into DirectXTK. Silverlight was the app framework for Windows Phone 7 as well, dropped on the floor for Windows Phone 8. C++/CX was replaced by a junk framework that is basically ATL with a new name, with the same tooling as Visual C++ 6.0 with ATL. UAP was the percusor for UWP. The "compatibility story" goes like this. Windows 8 drops all compatibility with former Windows, but WinRT requires rewriting the application three times, for phone, tablet and desktop, due to the API space. Windows 8.1 improves the situation by introducing UAP, where the views still have to be written three times, but the API space for business logic can be shared. Requires a rewrite from previous WinRT. Windows 10 introduces UWP, as consolidation of three platforms, requires a rewrite from previous WinRT. XAML islands get introduced as bridge between Win32 and UWP, a year later plan gets dropped and WinUI 3.0 gets introduced, and Project Reunion. Yet another year ensues, WinUi is now merged with Project Reunion as the Windows App SDK. Requires yet another rewrite. In the middle of this, .NET Native gets dropped, and .NET 6 still doesn't provide the same AOT capabilities. On the C++ side, a group of devs manages to kill C++/CX without any equivalent tooling, telling everyone complaining that customers should suck it up and wait for the day ISO C++ supports Herb Sutter's metaclasses ideas, so that they don't do any C++ extensions like C++/CX or god forbid Qt and C++ Builder. Lots of enterprises stuck with .NET Framework use WCF. As for Azure OS, lets see what the future holds, it isn't the only cloud OS in town.
int_19h 5y ago
My biggest beef with Sinofsky is that he was apparently the one heavily pushing for JavaScript as a high-level ".NET replacement" for end-user apps running on top of all that COM API in Win8. So much effort spent on dev tooling around that, when it could have been spent on improving .NET instead.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Also I think WinFS would really have been a great idea. I'm sad it was cancelled.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Yes, Longhorn failed not due to technical issues, although yes there were quite a few of them. It failed because teams worked against each other making sure it wouldn't happen, instead of sorting out the issues in a collaborative manner. Joe Duffy mentions on his Rustconf keynote that even with Midori running in front of Windows team, they were asserting it wasn't possible to have such an OS.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  To be fair, that’s precisely what Electron is, and Microsoft now uses it heavily. Mind you, they’re using Electron because they couldn’t make a .NET GUI framework live for more than two years. MAUI is due to die around 2025, mark my words.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    It is quite telling of the ongoing mess when Blazor steals the show, they keep talking about React Native for WinUI, and a third party (Uno) was able to deliver when Microsoft own teams can't. Also why on earth did they decided to go with Catalist for macOS, when everyone knows it is only good for porting iOS apps? I agree with the death expectation for MAUI.

easton 5y ago

This is what frustrates me about Microsoft sometimes. They try to stick to backwards compatibility as much as possible, then once in a while they decide to change something, usually do it not great (Windows 8), then they have to have a goodwill recovery period where they can’t break anything anymore. I think the backlash to 11’s changes means we’re probably stuck with the Windows 95 printer pane for another ten years. With the advent of high speed virtualization, it’s okay to break stuff (shoot, they tried it with XP Mode in 7, don’t know why they haven’t tried it again). I don’t know if we still need 20 years of compatibility.

GekkePrutser 5y ago

Oh yeah Win8 was such a big misstep. I really hated it and the server version which I still deal with sometimes today. I think Win11 is pretty good except for the fact that there's way too many old style settings dialogs left over, just like Win10. If it was actually consistent I'd love its design.