They do have a small number of initiatives, e.g. WinRT (a replacement for Win32), and they're introducing Apple-style sandboxing for apps distributed using MSIX

They do have a small number of initiatives, e.g. WinRT (a replacement for Win32), and they're introducing Apple-style sandboxing for apps distributed using MSIX, their "new" packaging technology. However, this tech is hard to use out-of-the-box. I have a company that sells a cross-platform tool which makes shipping code that uses new technologies for cross-platform apps much easier [1], and in particular, lets you ship from non-Windows platforms like Linux CI machines or Mac developer laptops. There's DirectStorage, a new API for games developers which I think is a port of tech developed for the Xbox. But otherwise, not really no. Windows appears to be in maintenance mode. Large parts of its development were outsourced to India, the higher level executives are disengaged. Their social media is full of left-wing Current Thing viral sharing rather than anything about developing Windows apps (see the bsky links in another post for examples). They are in some core tech areas nearly 20 years behind Apple. If there's any kind of strategy, it's not widely known. They seem to be faced with two intersecting problems: 1. Nobody targets the Windows API anymore directly, the only app that matters is Chrome and if the Chrome guys don't add support for something then that API will just go unused. Browsers have a policy of not exposing tech that's platform specific. So this dynamic is killing all desktop operating systems, not just Windows. Nobody is investing much in desktop Linux anymore, Apple do still invest in macOS albeit not at a huge level, I think because there's still an ecosystem of Apple-native apps out there. But even so they've focused on initiatives like Catalyst. Microsoft have tried to fix this by forking Chrome into Edge, but the Edge team seem reluctant to add any unique Windows features, perhaps because the Chrome codebase just isn't set up to handle that kind of extension. 2. The Windows codebase has reached end of life, IMO. It's notable that the new APIs or changes they make to existing APIs are all very buggy or have obvious design problems, and that Microsoft's own stable of apps don't get rewritten on top of them at any kind of speed. The core Win32 API is what nearly everything uses but was abandoned years ago, and if you use it your app will by default still look much like a Windows 95 app would. They seem unable to change it in any meaningful way, and also unable to design a sufficiently compelling competitor to HTML. It's still amazing to me that Marc Andreessen said in the mid 90s, "Netscape will reduce Windows to a poorly debugged set of device drivers" and that prediction actually came true. [1] https://hydraulic.dev/ https://hydraulic.dev/