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Or: Steve Ballmer oversaw the decline of Mircosoft's flagship product, but left before he could be blamed for it. A lot of Windows' current problems can be tra

Or: Steve Ballmer oversaw the decline of Mircosoft's flagship product, but left before he could be blamed for it. A lot of Windows' current problems can be traced back to the Ballmer era, including the framework schizophrenia, as Microsoft shifted between Win32, UWP, WPF, and god knows what else. This has lead to the current chaotic and disjointed UI experience, and served to confuse and drive away developers. Repeatedly sacrificing reliable and consistent UX while chasing shiny and new technologies is no way to run an OS.

schmuckonwheels 9mo ago
>including the framework schizophrenia, as Microsoft shifted between Win32, UWP, WPF Ah yes, and the solution being presented is Linux, with Xlib, Motif, Qt, GTK, and your choice of 167 different desktop environments. Don't forget the whole Wayland schism. Mac is no better, shifting SDKs every few years, except Apple goes one step further by breaking all legacy applications so you are forced to upgrade. Can't be schizo when you salt the earth and light a match to everything that came before the Current Thing.
- steve1977 9mo ago
  macOS has Cocoa since 2000, which is still useable, and SwiftUI since a few years. No comparison to the mess of UI toolkits on Windows.
  - schmuckonwheels 9mo ago
    And what about Carbon? Gone. 32-bit apps? Gone. PowerPC stuff? Anything more than a few years old? Forget it. You can't even run versions of iPhoto or iTunes after they deliberately broke them and replaced them with objectively shittier equivalents. Their own apps! Windows can still run programs from the 90s unmodified. There are VB6 apps from 1998 talking to Access databases still running small businesses today. Can't say the same for either Mac or Linux. It's not really a problem for Apple because their userbase is content to re-buy all their software every 5 years.
    - seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
      Is that a good or bad thing? Yes, Mac chops off legacy after a decade or so, but I don’t see not being able to run apps from the 90s as a problem (or if I did, I’d probably be running windows or Linux instead of Mac OS).
    - steve1977 9mo ago
      Well, that's true. It's an interesting point actually. Windows certainly wins in terms of binary compatibility. I was thinking more about the developer perspective, i.e. churn in terms of frameworks. Yes, PowerPC is gone. Intel will be gone soon. But both the transitions from PowerPC to Intel as well as from Intel to ARM were pretty straightforward for developers if you were using Cocoa and not doing any assembly stuff. Carbon only every was a bandaid to give devs some time for the transition to Cocoa.
      - schmuckonwheels 9mo ago
        Maybe I am a bit jaded, but with Apple's yearly OS release cycle — and breaking things nearly every time — I grew sick and tired of software I spent good money or relied on suddenly not working anymore. Imagine taking your car in for an oil change annually and the radio stopped working when you got it back. It's incompatible with the new oil, they say. You'd be furious. With the Windows of yore this wasn't so much of an issue — with 5-10 years between upgrade cycles — and service packs in between — you could space it out. When you work in the computer industry, there tends to be a disconnect with how they are used in the real world by real people — as tools. People grow accustomed to their tools and expect them to be reliable as opposed to some ephemeral service.
        seec 9mo ago
        I share your sentiment very strongly. Apple's change for the sake of change is extremely annoying, especially since the changes have been regressions lately. They always push their commercial interest at the cost of their users, refusing to maintain stuff properly to save money. At some point I had to change a Mac because the GPU wasn't compatible with some apps after they pushed their Metal framework. But it was working just fine for me, and I didn't really need to change it at this moment; Apple just decided so. And if you use their software on different hardware and make the mistake of upgrading just one, it is very likely that you will have to upgrade the other because the newer software version won't be compatible with the older hardware (had the problem with Notes/Reminders database needing an OS upgrade to be able to sync). Microsoft is all over the place, but at least it is very likely that you can get away with changing your hardware only once every 10 years if you buy high-end stuff.
  - pjmlp 9mo ago
    I suggest paying attention to some mac development podcasts.
    - steve1977 9mo ago
      What would I learn there?
      - pjmlp 9mo ago
        That development on macOS UI frameworks isn't as rosy.
        steve1977 9mo ago
        I'm not saying it's perfect. Just that it's less of a mess than the situation on Windows.
        pjmlp 9mo ago
        Again, listen to those podcasts, especially how Apple has (not) handled bug reports. Between Carbon, Cocoa, UI Touch, UI Kit, Catalyst, Swift UI, there is plenty to chose from, with many non overlapping capabilities. Then there is naturally the whole plethora of Kits, with several deprecated and replaced by others without feature parity, https://marcoeidinger.github.io/appleframeworks/ https://marcoeidinger.github.io/appleframeworks/
        steve1977 9mo ago
        Carbon is long deprecated and as mentioned was only ever meant as a transitional framework. Cocoa still exists and is usable. UITouch is not a framework, but a class in UIKit. UIkit still exists and is usable. Same for Catalyst. Same for SwiftUI. As said, I'm not pretending everything is sunshine and roses in Apple-Land. But at least Apple seems to mostly dogfood their own frameworks, which unfortunately doesn't seem to be the case anymore with Microsoft. WinUI 3 and WPF are supposed to be the "official" frameworks to use, but it seems Microsoft themselves are not using them consistently and they also don't seem to put a lot of resources behind them.
- hackyhacky 9mo ago
  > Ah yes, and the solution being presented is Linux, with Xlib, Motif, Qt, GTK I'm not going to descend into a "my OS's API is worse than yours" pissing match with you, because it's pointless and tangential. The issue is not "is the Windows framework situation worse than Linux" but rather "is the Windows framework situation worse than it used to be" and the answer is emphatically yes, and due mostly to Ballmer's obsession with chasing shiny things, such as that brief period when he decided that all Windows must look like a phone.
- hulitu 9mo ago
  > Xlib, Motif, Qt, GTK, Xlib and Motif are stable APIs. Qt and ... GTK on the other hand...
drnick1 9mo ago
I think MS's biggest mistake was to not properly maintain and develop the Foundation Classes, basically a thin C++ wrapper library on top of the C API that retained most of the benefits of the Win32 API while eliminating a lot of the boilerplate code. Instead they went after Java with the .NET managed stuff, bloated and slow compared to the native API. Qt is now the best "old school" UI framework by far.
franktankbank 9mo ago
Experimentation is a cost center?

schmuckonwheels 9mo ago

>including the framework schizophrenia, as Microsoft shifted between Win32, UWP, WPF Ah yes, and the solution being presented is Linux, with Xlib, Motif, Qt, GTK, and your choice of 167 different desktop environments. Don't forget the whole Wayland schism. Mac is no better, shifting SDKs every few years, except Apple goes one step further by breaking all legacy applications so you are forced to upgrade. Can't be schizo when you salt the earth and light a match to everything that came before the Current Thing.

steve1977 9mo ago
macOS has Cocoa since 2000, which is still useable, and SwiftUI since a few years. No comparison to the mess of UI toolkits on Windows.
- schmuckonwheels 9mo ago
  And what about Carbon? Gone. 32-bit apps? Gone. PowerPC stuff? Anything more than a few years old? Forget it. You can't even run versions of iPhoto or iTunes after they deliberately broke them and replaced them with objectively shittier equivalents. Their own apps! Windows can still run programs from the 90s unmodified. There are VB6 apps from 1998 talking to Access databases still running small businesses today. Can't say the same for either Mac or Linux. It's not really a problem for Apple because their userbase is content to re-buy all their software every 5 years.
  - seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
    Is that a good or bad thing? Yes, Mac chops off legacy after a decade or so, but I don’t see not being able to run apps from the 90s as a problem (or if I did, I’d probably be running windows or Linux instead of Mac OS).
  - steve1977 9mo ago
    Well, that's true. It's an interesting point actually. Windows certainly wins in terms of binary compatibility. I was thinking more about the developer perspective, i.e. churn in terms of frameworks. Yes, PowerPC is gone. Intel will be gone soon. But both the transitions from PowerPC to Intel as well as from Intel to ARM were pretty straightforward for developers if you were using Cocoa and not doing any assembly stuff. Carbon only every was a bandaid to give devs some time for the transition to Cocoa.
    - schmuckonwheels 9mo ago
      Maybe I am a bit jaded, but with Apple's yearly OS release cycle — and breaking things nearly every time — I grew sick and tired of software I spent good money or relied on suddenly not working anymore. Imagine taking your car in for an oil change annually and the radio stopped working when you got it back. It's incompatible with the new oil, they say. You'd be furious. With the Windows of yore this wasn't so much of an issue — with 5-10 years between upgrade cycles — and service packs in between — you could space it out. When you work in the computer industry, there tends to be a disconnect with how they are used in the real world by real people — as tools. People grow accustomed to their tools and expect them to be reliable as opposed to some ephemeral service.
      - seec 9mo ago
        I share your sentiment very strongly. Apple's change for the sake of change is extremely annoying, especially since the changes have been regressions lately. They always push their commercial interest at the cost of their users, refusing to maintain stuff properly to save money. At some point I had to change a Mac because the GPU wasn't compatible with some apps after they pushed their Metal framework. But it was working just fine for me, and I didn't really need to change it at this moment; Apple just decided so. And if you use their software on different hardware and make the mistake of upgrading just one, it is very likely that you will have to upgrade the other because the newer software version won't be compatible with the older hardware (had the problem with Notes/Reminders database needing an OS upgrade to be able to sync). Microsoft is all over the place, but at least it is very likely that you can get away with changing your hardware only once every 10 years if you buy high-end stuff.
- pjmlp 9mo ago
  I suggest paying attention to some mac development podcasts.
  - steve1977 9mo ago
    What would I learn there?
    - pjmlp 9mo ago
      That development on macOS UI frameworks isn't as rosy.
      - steve1977 9mo ago
        I'm not saying it's perfect. Just that it's less of a mess than the situation on Windows.
        pjmlp 9mo ago
        Again, listen to those podcasts, especially how Apple has (not) handled bug reports. Between Carbon, Cocoa, UI Touch, UI Kit, Catalyst, Swift UI, there is plenty to chose from, with many non overlapping capabilities. Then there is naturally the whole plethora of Kits, with several deprecated and replaced by others without feature parity, https://marcoeidinger.github.io/appleframeworks/ https://marcoeidinger.github.io/appleframeworks/
        steve1977 9mo ago
        Carbon is long deprecated and as mentioned was only ever meant as a transitional framework. Cocoa still exists and is usable. UITouch is not a framework, but a class in UIKit. UIkit still exists and is usable. Same for Catalyst. Same for SwiftUI. As said, I'm not pretending everything is sunshine and roses in Apple-Land. But at least Apple seems to mostly dogfood their own frameworks, which unfortunately doesn't seem to be the case anymore with Microsoft. WinUI 3 and WPF are supposed to be the "official" frameworks to use, but it seems Microsoft themselves are not using them consistently and they also don't seem to put a lot of resources behind them.
hackyhacky 9mo ago
> Ah yes, and the solution being presented is Linux, with Xlib, Motif, Qt, GTK I'm not going to descend into a "my OS's API is worse than yours" pissing match with you, because it's pointless and tangential. The issue is not "is the Windows framework situation worse than Linux" but rather "is the Windows framework situation worse than it used to be" and the answer is emphatically yes, and due mostly to Ballmer's obsession with chasing shiny things, such as that brief period when he decided that all Windows must look like a phone.
hulitu 9mo ago
> Xlib, Motif, Qt, GTK, Xlib and Motif are stable APIs. Qt and ... GTK on the other hand...

drnick1 9mo ago

I think MS's biggest mistake was to not properly maintain and develop the Foundation Classes, basically a thin C++ wrapper library on top of the C API that retained most of the benefits of the Win32 API while eliminating a lot of the boilerplate code. Instead they went after Java with the .NET managed stuff, bloated and slow compared to the native API. Qt is now the best "old school" UI framework by far.

franktankbank 9mo ago

Experimentation is a cost center?