If even MS themselves doesn’t bother to be consistent then developers certainly won’t.

I am a long time Windows desktop dev but all my new projects are either web or Electron. I am done with the mess in Windows.

Windows 8 was a catastrophic failure, and Apple seems to be leaning into the same failed philosophy now.

I agree but when you look at their profits it seems MS and Apple are doing the right thing even if I don’t like it as a developer.

The Mac platform also used to be very insulated; the culture meant that the prospect of creating an app or simple utility and selling it was viable much longer than it was on Windows, where the culture is that everything is either gratis-style free or warez-style free. The invasion of the Web means that Mac users are increasingly being conditioned to get things for free, too, so the viability of paid apps has taken a big hit. SaaS is the way to make money now.

So I take it this approach is disqualified on your terms for not being meaningful, which raises the question about what "meaningful" means.

My own guess is that it's a matter of convenience of distribution: enter an URL and you can start using the app.

Sadly, the solution seems very business-driven. The ROI threshold to making a desktop-native app is quite high.

> And you will still have to come up with a mobile optimized UI, as a standard desktop UI layout will just not work on 5" screens.

No tool will magically solve this problem for you. Qt has excellent support for responsive design if that's how you'd propose to solve it.

And no, Qt is not very niche.

Aren't all of those C/C++? There's time and place for manually managing memory, figuring out UB and segfaults. If you're trying to render a frame full of AAA graphics in under 15 milliseconds, or go through a million requests a second, then I don't mind it. But if I'm just writing an email client...

No.

> If you're trying to render a frame full of AAA graphics in under 15 milliseconds

Irrelevant.

> But if I'm just writing an email client...

Use bindings.

You can see how on mobile platforms, where app distribution is not a big problem, native applications are still doing well.

This isn't new, I remember talking to the CIO of a big bank twenty years ago about this.

On top of that users quite like software delivered through a browser as it allows them to bypass their IT department.

From the consumer side it's more about costs, people will tolerate all sorts of shit as long as it's free.

I still remember how awesome it was I could stream music sitting at a train station while browsing the internet.

The list could go on but the point I doubt Nadella is a visionary, he's just following others. Not necessarily a bad thing for the company and its shareholders, it's a fairly safe approach. I miss the days when they actually had original ideas, like the Kinect.

So to refer back to the top comment we could say that Microsoft is proposing WSL as a cross-platform API for GUI apps.

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/gui-a...

[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/the-initial-previ...

On Windows 10, you just need to install your own X server. I'm using VcXsrv with great success to use GUI software running on WSL1.

And, IIRC, .NET Core doesn't support WPF forms for legal/trademark reasons. But other MSFT supported .NET Forms libraries that happen to be API/feature compatible work on Windows/OSX/Linux/Android/iOS.

It does actually although you are correct in your general point.