> The other issue is that now days Windows programming skills are basically non-transferable. It used to be everything ran on Windows, so if you spent some time

> The other issue is that now days Windows programming skills are basically non-transferable. It used to be everything ran on Windows, so if you spent some time at Microsoft learning the depths of Win32, you were easily employable as a senior/principal engineer at a ton of other companies. > > Nowadays the number of C++ Windows development positions is so low that unless a developer wants to spend their entire life at Microsoft, learning native Windows development is basically wasted time on the resume. And it's a negative-cycle too: competent (let alone expert) desktop app developers will become a rare-breed as the capabilities of the web platform (i.e. Chromium) keep on growing, year after year. I figure that eventually even the most web-unfriendly and nativist of native desktop applications (e.g. Photoshop, AutoCAD, et cetera) will end up as WASM blobs rendering to a <canvas> as their UI slowly shifts from whatever in-house Win32 wrappers they have to HTML+CSS. I don't think Tim Berners-Lee could have ever imagined that. ...and this is all because MSFT couldn't put together a consistent and coherent modern desktop development story after VB6 got killed in 2001. If you're some wide-eyed kid in 2012 who wants to make a simple form/window/app that plays fart sounds when you click a button it's 100x easier to do that in HTML+JS than in WinForms/.NET (whereas in VB6 it might even be easier than in HTML+JS, tbh). The biggest shame here is that as everything moves to the web and off from desktops, we'll lose control over our own data: what incentive would 2033's Adobe have to let you download your own PSD files from the WASM-only Photoshop of the future?