5 ms·

> Alignment with Microsoft Goals > We are being thoughtful about resourcing. This effort is happening alongside other critical responsibilities like security,

by arunc 1y ago

> Alignment with Microsoft Goals > We are being thoughtful about resourcing. This effort is happening alongside other critical responsibilities like security, platform stability, and support for existing products. Our current focus is on foundational work that unlocks value for contributors and increase transparency. We are aligning this work with Microsoft’s broader business priorities to ensure long-term support and impact. I don't sense any benevolence in their words. They are just pulling off their resources and dumping the framework on the public, hoping passionate losers will contribute.

paavohtl 1y ago
This is definitely corporate speak for "no guaranteed support, no planned further updates beyond critical security bugs, you are on your own".
nine_k 1y ago
Apache Windows when? More seriously, a desktop UI toolkit is hardly a moat by now, especially a Windows toolkit, Windows having 3-4 very different look-and-feels mixed and shipped with the official distribution. OTOH security and stability are things that Windows critically depend on to stay on the laptops and desktops in medical, governmental, and financial institutions, and on devices of executives.
- echelon 1y ago
  This feels like Windows itself is no longer producing enough growth for Microsoft relative to its other efforts. Even the enterprise sales lock-in isn't compelling enough for the cloud/AI-centric future Microsoft envisions. So Microsoft is slowly pulling resources that it can instead invest into Azure and AI and other high-growth business units. I don't watch Windows too closely. Have there been any other signals of waning investment into Windows? Has Nadella or the other leadership admitted to this? Hasn't Microsoft also been pulling back from Xbox? IIRC, haven't they been trying to consolidate and use gaming to lionize Windows as a platform? After spending billions on multiple AAA studios? That would seem counter to a Windows pullback strategy. Is this a case of the left hand not talking to the right hand?
  - gyulai 1y ago
    > Have there been any other signals of waning investment into Windows? Wasn't there a story some while back about them crawling the web for PWAs and putting them on the Microsoft Store (or is it Windows store?) to make it into less of a ghost town? And if you go to their official website, browsing vaguely in the direction of UI development, you will see them advertising PWAs as first-class citizens of the Windows ecosystem. I also vaguely remember that Windows+Edge offers special APIs to PWAs for things like file system access and so forth that are unparalleled on other platforms. I take this push for PWAs (combined with their own lack of dogfooding -- Office is not written with Win UI) as them basically throwing in the towel on Windows-native desktop software (outside of games, maybe). But, to be fair, native desktop development has seen a lack of investment on all desktop platforms. JavaFX is a ghost town too. All of that could change, depending on what happens next with Chrome, Bing, and Mozilla. -- The future of each of those seems to be hanging in the balance at the moment. The web could become a mere implementation detail of the Google monopoly, rather than the open thing it is today. Couple that with a government-level push for digital sovereignty in the E.U. and other places (certainly China). Then, maybe, you will see renewed interest in desktop GUI apps. On a side note: I think it's amazing what has happened in the open-source space with Rust-based UI frameworks (iced, egui, slint) and COSMIC. The future for cross-platform desktop UI development hasn't looked so bright, maybe since the introduction of Java Swing (was that in the early 00s?)
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      Qt and VCL/FireMonkey are pretty much alive, as 3rd party .NET like Avalonia and Uno. Apple is also doing just fine. It is Microsoft that went south, as Satya apparently sees no value on Windows. Note the drama on XBox, the console not the Microsoft Games Studios brand, as suffering from the same lack of interest from Microsoft's management.
      - gyulai 1y ago
        > Qt and VCL/FireMonkey are pretty much alive, as 3rd party .NET like Avalonia and Uno. Last time I looked into Uno, it seemed to me more like a mobile-first play (similar to Flutter), but maybe I missed something there. Qt is still joined at the hips with C++, and I'm finding it hard to imagine that the next generation of developers will go in for C++ over alternatives like Rust. There is a QML/JavaScript story. But why, on earth, would you go there, if history hasn't forced your hand, as it did with the Web. I hear good things about Avalonia, but: Why throw out the baby with the bathwater and build something "open" within a monopolist's walled garden. > Apple is also doing just fine. But "lack of investment" is still not entirely improper as a characterization of how they prioritize desktop versus mobile.
pjmlp 1y ago
Yeah, WinUI has been a disaster.
tempodox 1y ago
> hoping passionate losers will contribute. Offloading the work to their victims. Maybe they will even make it usable again.
michaelcampbell 1y ago
> passionate losers This is unduly meanspirited. Your passion projects are not even considered to probably the vast majority of the world; that doesn't make you a loser. I have zero interest in the Win11 UI, and am even on board with the cynical view that this is purely a bean counter cost savings for MS rather than some benevolent outreach. But I respect the people that take this on and want to keep it going.
- bialpio 1y ago
  > Your passion projects are not even considered to probably the vast majority of the world; that doesn't make you a loser. Not OP but I understood this as "contributing for free to a project owned by a corporation worth more money than you could realistically spend in a lifetime is what makes you a loser".
  - tough 1y ago
    what if that contribution benefits me personally in any way whatsoever?
    - bialpio 1y ago
      You need to ask OP, I don't know what they meant, just how I personally understood it.
    - LexiMax 1y ago
      That is the self-interested feeling that Open Source preys on. And I do mean "prey" with a negative connotation. One of the biggest perks of Open Source from a company's perspective is that you can get developers to work on your project for free without paying them. However, those same developers have very little say in the direction of your product, and any forking of your project would have to compete the economies of scale that come from being a company. The only downside is that you have to worry about being out-scaled by a bigger company, as the developers of ElasticSearch, Redis, Docker, and others found out first-hand. This is distinct from Free Software, which has different dynamics that are much more friendly to mutual benefit, collaboration, and forking, especially if there's no CLA that pools all of the copyright into one corporate or non-profit entity. But then again, this sort of Free Software moralizing is expressly the reason why Open Source was created as an alternative in the first place. The OSI even used to admit as such on their website: https://web.archive.org/web/20021001164015/http://www.opensource.org/docs/history.php https://web.archive.org/web/20021001164015/http://www.openso...
_fat_santa 1y ago
Usually I get why companies release their UI frameworks. I've strongly considered using Atlassian's and AWS's frameworks in the past to build web apps because if it's good enough for Jira/AWS, it's probably good enough for my B2B saas app. But I personally don't know why anyone would reach for this framework. Maybe if you're building a Windows app and you want a very consistent look and for your app to feel "native", but aren't there better options out there for doing this already?

by arunc 1y ago

paavohtl 1y ago

This is definitely corporate speak for "no guaranteed support, no planned further updates beyond critical security bugs, you are on your own".

nine_k 1y ago

Apache Windows when? More seriously, a desktop UI toolkit is hardly a moat by now, especially a Windows toolkit, Windows having 3-4 very different look-and-feels mixed and shipped with the official distribution. OTOH security and stability are things that Windows critically depend on to stay on the laptops and desktops in medical, governmental, and financial institutions, and on devices of executives.

echelon 1y ago
This feels like Windows itself is no longer producing enough growth for Microsoft relative to its other efforts. Even the enterprise sales lock-in isn't compelling enough for the cloud/AI-centric future Microsoft envisions. So Microsoft is slowly pulling resources that it can instead invest into Azure and AI and other high-growth business units. I don't watch Windows too closely. Have there been any other signals of waning investment into Windows? Has Nadella or the other leadership admitted to this? Hasn't Microsoft also been pulling back from Xbox? IIRC, haven't they been trying to consolidate and use gaming to lionize Windows as a platform? After spending billions on multiple AAA studios? That would seem counter to a Windows pullback strategy. Is this a case of the left hand not talking to the right hand?
- gyulai 1y ago
  > Have there been any other signals of waning investment into Windows? Wasn't there a story some while back about them crawling the web for PWAs and putting them on the Microsoft Store (or is it Windows store?) to make it into less of a ghost town? And if you go to their official website, browsing vaguely in the direction of UI development, you will see them advertising PWAs as first-class citizens of the Windows ecosystem. I also vaguely remember that Windows+Edge offers special APIs to PWAs for things like file system access and so forth that are unparalleled on other platforms. I take this push for PWAs (combined with their own lack of dogfooding -- Office is not written with Win UI) as them basically throwing in the towel on Windows-native desktop software (outside of games, maybe). But, to be fair, native desktop development has seen a lack of investment on all desktop platforms. JavaFX is a ghost town too. All of that could change, depending on what happens next with Chrome, Bing, and Mozilla. -- The future of each of those seems to be hanging in the balance at the moment. The web could become a mere implementation detail of the Google monopoly, rather than the open thing it is today. Couple that with a government-level push for digital sovereignty in the E.U. and other places (certainly China). Then, maybe, you will see renewed interest in desktop GUI apps. On a side note: I think it's amazing what has happened in the open-source space with Rust-based UI frameworks (iced, egui, slint) and COSMIC. The future for cross-platform desktop UI development hasn't looked so bright, maybe since the introduction of Java Swing (was that in the early 00s?)
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Qt and VCL/FireMonkey are pretty much alive, as 3rd party .NET like Avalonia and Uno. Apple is also doing just fine. It is Microsoft that went south, as Satya apparently sees no value on Windows. Note the drama on XBox, the console not the Microsoft Games Studios brand, as suffering from the same lack of interest from Microsoft's management.
    - gyulai 1y ago
      > Qt and VCL/FireMonkey are pretty much alive, as 3rd party .NET like Avalonia and Uno. Last time I looked into Uno, it seemed to me more like a mobile-first play (similar to Flutter), but maybe I missed something there. Qt is still joined at the hips with C++, and I'm finding it hard to imagine that the next generation of developers will go in for C++ over alternatives like Rust. There is a QML/JavaScript story. But why, on earth, would you go there, if history hasn't forced your hand, as it did with the Web. I hear good things about Avalonia, but: Why throw out the baby with the bathwater and build something "open" within a monopolist's walled garden. > Apple is also doing just fine. But "lack of investment" is still not entirely improper as a characterization of how they prioritize desktop versus mobile.

pjmlp 1y ago

Yeah, WinUI has been a disaster.

tempodox 1y ago

> hoping passionate losers will contribute. Offloading the work to their victims. Maybe they will even make it usable again.

michaelcampbell 1y ago

> passionate losers This is unduly meanspirited. Your passion projects are not even considered to probably the vast majority of the world; that doesn't make you a loser. I have zero interest in the Win11 UI, and am even on board with the cynical view that this is purely a bean counter cost savings for MS rather than some benevolent outreach. But I respect the people that take this on and want to keep it going.

bialpio 1y ago
> Your passion projects are not even considered to probably the vast majority of the world; that doesn't make you a loser. Not OP but I understood this as "contributing for free to a project owned by a corporation worth more money than you could realistically spend in a lifetime is what makes you a loser".
- tough 1y ago
  what if that contribution benefits me personally in any way whatsoever?
  - bialpio 1y ago
    You need to ask OP, I don't know what they meant, just how I personally understood it.
  - LexiMax 1y ago
    That is the self-interested feeling that Open Source preys on. And I do mean "prey" with a negative connotation. One of the biggest perks of Open Source from a company's perspective is that you can get developers to work on your project for free without paying them. However, those same developers have very little say in the direction of your product, and any forking of your project would have to compete the economies of scale that come from being a company. The only downside is that you have to worry about being out-scaled by a bigger company, as the developers of ElasticSearch, Redis, Docker, and others found out first-hand. This is distinct from Free Software, which has different dynamics that are much more friendly to mutual benefit, collaboration, and forking, especially if there's no CLA that pools all of the copyright into one corporate or non-profit entity. But then again, this sort of Free Software moralizing is expressly the reason why Open Source was created as an alternative in the first place. The OSI even used to admit as such on their website: https://web.archive.org/web/20021001164015/http://www.opensource.org/docs/history.php https://web.archive.org/web/20021001164015/http://www.openso...

_fat_santa 1y ago

Usually I get why companies release their UI frameworks. I've strongly considered using Atlassian's and AWS's frameworks in the past to build web apps because if it's good enough for Jira/AWS, it's probably good enough for my B2B saas app. But I personally don't know why anyone would reach for this framework. Maybe if you're building a Windows app and you want a very consistent look and for your app to feel "native", but aren't there better options out there for doing this already?