I don't watch Windows too closely. Have there been any other signals of waning investment into Windows? Has Nadella or the other leadership admitted to this?
Hasn't Microsoft also been pulling back from Xbox? IIRC, haven't they been trying to consolidate and use gaming to lionize Windows as a platform? After spending billions on multiple AAA studios? That would seem counter to a Windows pullback strategy. Is this a case of the left hand not talking to the right hand?
Wasn't there a story some while back about them crawling the web for PWAs and putting them on the Microsoft Store (or is it Windows store?) to make it into less of a ghost town? And if you go to their official website, browsing vaguely in the direction of UI development, you will see them advertising PWAs as first-class citizens of the Windows ecosystem. I also vaguely remember that Windows+Edge offers special APIs to PWAs for things like file system access and so forth that are unparalleled on other platforms.
I take this push for PWAs (combined with their own lack of dogfooding -- Office is not written with Win UI) as them basically throwing in the towel on Windows-native desktop software (outside of games, maybe).
But, to be fair, native desktop development has seen a lack of investment on all desktop platforms. JavaFX is a ghost town too.
All of that could change, depending on what happens next with Chrome, Bing, and Mozilla. -- The future of each of those seems to be hanging in the balance at the moment.
The web could become a mere implementation detail of the Google monopoly, rather than the open thing it is today. Couple that with a government-level push for digital sovereignty in the E.U. and other places (certainly China). Then, maybe, you will see renewed interest in desktop GUI apps.
On a side note: I think it's amazing what has happened in the open-source space with Rust-based UI frameworks (iced, egui, slint) and COSMIC. The future for cross-platform desktop UI development hasn't looked so bright, maybe since the introduction of Java Swing (was that in the early 00s?)
Apple is also doing just fine.
It is Microsoft that went south, as Satya apparently sees no value on Windows.
Note the drama on XBox, the console not the Microsoft Games Studios brand, as suffering from the same lack of interest from Microsoft's management.
Last time I looked into Uno, it seemed to me more like a mobile-first play (similar to Flutter), but maybe I missed something there.
Qt is still joined at the hips with C++, and I'm finding it hard to imagine that the next generation of developers will go in for C++ over alternatives like Rust. There is a QML/JavaScript story. But why, on earth, would you go there, if history hasn't forced your hand, as it did with the Web.
I hear good things about Avalonia, but: Why throw out the baby with the bathwater and build something "open" within a monopolist's walled garden.
> Apple is also doing just fine.
But "lack of investment" is still not entirely improper as a characterization of how they prioritize desktop versus mobile.
are not going to write code.
I don’t doubt that the amount of code will not reduce, it’ll just be easier and easier to get AI to fix it.
We are still less than two years into widespread use of this technology, and it’s surprising how good it is.
I am a ‘greybeard’ compiler guy and modern LLMs fix compiler bugs better than me, to a large extent. And it keeps slightly getting better every few weeks.
I firmly believe having LLMs generate code for current languages is a transition step, just like Assembly devs had to be convinced optimising compilers were generating the same kind of code they would write themselves.
They are not there yet, but the day will come.
But ignoring that for now, LLMs can already do better than modern compilers when it comes to optimizing code.
It has become a neat way of finding opportunities to implement in a compiler.
Give the LLM a compiler generated piece of assembly and it will sometimes spit out a slightly better version. Then you try and figure out if it's possible to implement it in the compiler. This works really well for blind spots in compilers like generating good vectorized code.
Yep, I guess you can train an LLM on a bunch of binaries to get it to mimic a SotA compiler with some accuracy, which may or may not improve over time, but come on. Times where there were free performance increases are gone, and this is not the area where shipping any bullshit real fast will get you any sort of advantage.
* Which are unlikely to happen again in the foreseeable future.
The next generation will not choose a language that is even more cumbersome to use and ugly.
Do you mean it is amazing how poor is an experience and how many features, widgets and controls they lack when compared with something like FPC/Lazarus and Qt?
Rust is a nice thing, but its UI ecosystem simply cannot even compare.
What's interesting is the speed at which Rust UI toolkits develop and maybe even mature.
It doesn't matter how many of Rust UI toolkits there are. Consider that there are a lot of Rust game engines, and pretty much zero games written in it, because even C++ gives you better trade-offs in that particular space.
I've tried using Qt (non QML, using rust-qt) last week... initially things were looking fine (despite unsafe everywhere)... but I found quickly that I need unsupported things (deriving from C++ classes), and the project isn't really maintained anymore, so I'll need to so some low level work myself if I want to proceed.
From google's ai result Windows ($25b) is 1/2 the size of Office (54.9b) and 1/3 the size of Azure ($75b) in terms of revenue.
Windows is definitely not the cash cow for Microsoft it once was.
More seriously, a desktop UI toolkit is hardly a moat by now, especially a Windows toolkit, Windows having 3-4 very different look-and-feels mixed and shipped with the official distribution.
OTOH security and stability are things that Windows critically depend on to stay on the laptops and desktops in medical, governmental, and financial institutions, and on devices of executives.