Apple have yet to dishearten me like that in the last 10 years since I started investing into their technologies. With Microsoft there has always been a Sword of Damocles hanging over your head.

I still harbor frustrations from the indecisive flip-flopping that occurred in the Windows ecosystem from Vista -> 7 -> 8 -> 10. It's still not easy to tell at a glance what Microsoft's primary APIs/frameworks currently are, what they're supposed to be called, or what their long term strategy is (besides masquerading as the new champion of open-source), and that doesn't inspire confidence.

One thing I'll credit Microsoft over Apple though, is the quality of their documentation.

It's been a while since I had to program native, non-cross-platform Windows apps, but isn't the flip-flopping mostly about what's considered the standard for UI programming, yet older technologies still work?

I could still make an application with MFC, if I felt particularly masochistic. Carbon on the other hand…

I was referring to things like removing the Start Button/Menu in one version then bringing it back in the next.

Or the "Metro" versus "Classic Desktop" duality, where you had two versions of each builtin app. Some documents/links inexplicably opened in one version and other things in the other. Some dialogs used the classic UI while others used Metro. Some system preferences used the new fullscreen UI subsystem while others opened in the legacy Windows 95'ish panels..and they linked to each other! (like desktop resolution/monitor settings.)

I recall an instance where I could not copy/paste a password for a VPN service, because the password field appeared in a Metro-based sidebar overlay on the "classic" desktop, that collapsed itself when I clicked on a classic window.... Of course Metro was thankfully disowned by subsequent Windows releases as well, but it's still a cautionary tale of Microsoft's indecisiveness and Lovecraftian UI horrors.

Or earlier situations like when they cannibalized DirectInput in favor of the dumbed-down XInput API, dropping advanced features for force-feedback joysticks.

Or when you could not get great DirectX performance or access all of its features from within .NET for quite a while.

WPF was not used by Microsoft themselves in their own products as much as its adopters hoped, either.

Whereas on the other side of the fence, Apple has already been using Swift in quite a few user-facing areas of their products, and their latest graphics tech was fully usable from their latest language since Day 1.

Objective-C still reigns supreme in some areas of Apple platforms, like real time audio.

While C++ is the language to go for device drivers and Metal shaders.

So there are still a couple of Swift free zones as of today.

I can list similar stuff being left behing by Apple, or even link that Java ONE video with Steve Job talking about Java going to be Mac OS X "Swift".

> Objective-C still reigns supreme in some areas of Apple platforms, like real time audio.

This at least should receive some improvement in the form of the new Swift-based Accelerate APIs:

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/718/

You can still run Carbon on Mojave. It's been deprecated for a few years, sure, but obviously so has MFC.

> what their long term strategy is (besides masquerading as the new champion of open-source), and that doesn't inspire confidence.

The WinUI team started to publish publicly about their roadmap, you can see some information here: https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/blob/master/d...

So, I'm not a windows developer and I'm not familiar with their APIs and technologies, but they seem describe a clear strategy for "WinUI 3.0" as far as I can tell.

Past history tends to indicate WinUI will be in the dustbin in a few years to be replaced by some new and shiny framework, possibly in response to SwiftUI if that turns out to be really successful.