7 ms·
The decisions reg UI frameworks are largely due to internal political conflicts, mostly between DevDiv and Windows.
by cjbgkagh 10mo ago
The decisions reg UI frameworks are largely due to internal political conflicts, mostly between DevDiv and Windows.
- markus_zhang 10mo agoJust curious what is DevDiv? Tools division?
- xmcp123 10mo agoAs I understand it, .NET, developer tools, and VS. Basically you have tight OS integration vs developer friendly cross platform.
- seanmcdirmid 10mo agoI think it also includes GitHub now.
- Conan_Kudo 10mo agoI believe GitHub is under a different group (CoreAI), not DevDiv.
- markus_zhang 10mo agoThank you!
- easton 10mo agoFrom the outside looking in one wonders why this is allowed to continue. Microsoft’s old school “developer tools for money” business is slowly dying (because Visual Studio proper is less popular than its ever been since so much is targeting web), you would think they’d reorganize and move .net and GitHub and stuff into their cloud team and yeet whatever toxic leadership is preventing Windows from using Microsoft’s own frameworks. IIRC .NET was banned from core Windows components after longhorn died, but its been 20 years. .NET is fast now, and C++ is faster still. Externally developed web frameworks shouldn’t be required for Windows.
- cjbgkagh 10mo agoIt’s a largely dysfunctional org creating largely dysfunctional software, I.e. Conway law. Dysfunctional orgs tend not to be capable of fixing themselves, especially without external threat. Satya Nadella, like many CEOs, seems mostly interested in impressing his peers and these days that means fancy AI, before that it was Quantum chips. Microsoft has produced some great technology and when I was last there I was definitely focusing on getting as much of the good stuff out into open source as possible. Back in the early V8 days the execs imagined JavaScript would keep getting exponentially faster, I tired to explain with a similar investment anything V8 could do dotnet could do better as we had more information available for optimization.
- kombine 10mo agoYeah, .NET is actually an impressive piece of tech. They have F# too which is a really solid programming language. And then they chose React of all things to build core OS UI.
- pjmlp 10mo agoBecause .NET is under DevDiv, F# came from Microsoft Research, and the OS is under Windows team. Windows team even refuses to have managed bindings for DirectX, like Apple and Google do on their platforms. Managed DirectX and XNA were pushed by highly motivated individuals, and lasted only as long as they stayed at Microsoft.
- pjmlp 10mo agoLonghorn was politics, then Google ate their lunch on mobile with Java and JavaScript userspace, across two platforms. DevDiv is a "here C++ rules!" silo, even the Rust adoption is being widely embraced at Azure, less so on Windows team.
- zamalek 10mo agoYeah, as far as I understand it, that politics is: Sinofsky entrenched NIH on every team that he touched.
- asveikau 10mo agoThey have a lot of staff turnover too, and each generation of new SDE has less of a clue how the old stuff worked. So when they're tasked with replacing the old stuff, they don't understand what it does, and the rewrite ends up doing less. That was my impression of one of the major problems when I worked there 2008-2011. But I don't think it's just one problem.
- nextos 10mo agoI think that because their total compensation is lower than FAANG, especially at senior levels, and they are seen as uncool, they sometimes have issues retaining top-notch talent. It's paradoxical, because MS Research is probably the best PLT organization in the world. But they have failed to move a lot of that know-how into production. Besides, because it's an older company, it might have more organizational entropy, i.e. dysfunctional middle-management. As you say it's probably several other causes too. But still, hard to understand how they can create F#, F*, and Dafny, just to name a few, and fail with their mainstream products.
- zipy124 10mo agoYou also probably couldn't pay me enough to work in the kind of environment that produces such buggy software as Microsoft teams. A message based app which can't even guarantee delivery of messages, or synchronization across devices isn't a good sign for management and delivery.
- asveikau 10mo agoI was a unix head at the time and ran OpenBSD on my personal Thinkpad. I figured a stint on the Windows team would broaden my horizons and expose me to differences. It did that. I don't regret it. I did in the end feel that the company was not my vibe, but I respect and appreciate some of what came out of there.
- asveikau 10mo agoBack when I was there, part of my calculus was that cost of living in Seattle was cheaper than the bay. It was about 35% cheaper back then, according to regional CPI data I looked at at the time. Not sure what the difference is today. I believe housing is still substantially cheaper. I think a few years after I left when more Big Tech opened offices in Seattle, competing companies started paying Bay Area salaries for Seattle living, removing this argument. I haven't watched this closely in recent years. But fwiw, I was able to save and invest a lot in my Seattle days, despite a salary that was lower than in the bay.