Microsoft’s Monopoly Hangover

Re:Microsoft’s Monopoly Hangover by CannisterFlux on Thursday July 27, 2017 @05:37AM (#14863787)

Didn't the problems start even before that? Windows 7 phone was the first new phone platform from Microsoft and was widely regarded as pretty good by the pundits. It had a whole new set of APIs though compared to Win32 (as could be expected), based on a Silverlight-like platform IIRC. Then Microsoft changed all of the APIs again for phone 8 as you outlined. That really scared off a lot of developers I think. Who would be willing to code for something so unstable? 2 new sets of APIs in as many years, with no kind of overlap or migration plan.

All these changes had their reasoned explanations back in the day: the install base was small so it didn't have much impact and they were removing cruft each time, but with hindsight it was a really bad way to go about creating a healthy ecosystem.

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Re:Microsoft’s Monopoly Hangover by pjmlp on Thursday July 27, 2017 @05:49AM (#14863836)

Kind of, it had to with "WinDev vs DevTools relationship" I refer to.

Windows 7 was .NET based, Silverlight for apps and XNA for games, native code was only available to Microsoft partners.

Then the WinDev won the next round and we got WinRT, fully based on COM, based on the initial design of .NET before CLR was a thing (Ext-VOS).

As side effect XNA and Silverlight were killed, not even ported to WinRT, and as I mentioned for accelerated graphics the APIs were only exposed at C++ level.

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