Microsoft mismanaged it but there was a potential parallel universe where they were successful at that plan and consumer versions of Windows would be locked to the Microsoft store.

They did a bunch of terrible inept rollouts with confusing technology for both users and developers and effectively shot themselves in the foot. But it did not have to go down that way.

Yep. They fumbled the ball on step 1 of demand aggregation and we got lucky there was nothing of value for the 99% of users that will blindly take the easy path.

> there was a potential parallel universe where they were successful at that plan and consumer versions of Windows would be locked to the Microsoft store.

Sounds like a nightmare universe.

I've got a hobby app in kotlin multiplatform with iOS/Android/Windows/WASM builds and while I have no issues with Apple's App Store or Google Play, I've had nothing but problems trying to support Windows Store.

The MSIX installer format is horrendous to deal with and the certification process for new releases on Windows Store is always far too long and in the cases they do find issues the reports of the issue that they log are entirely worthless.

I ended up just pulling the app off the Windows Store entirely and making it a downloadable *.msi installer. While the extra layer of presumed integrity of the app being on the Microsoft Store would be nice it wasn't remotely worth the effort for the tiny amount of people who were using the Windows version in the first place, especially given the app is free.

That's funny because I don't presume anything on the Windows store has integrity and feel safer downloading the MSI from the official source.

this is literally just an xbox lol

Well, no, that was never the plan, except in the heads of conspiracy theorists.

> Microsoft has way too much of legacy software people use, banning it all overnight will not go well at all.

A lot of legacy software was killed off with the move to 64-bit Windows. Consumers survived that and for businesses registering their software with MS isn't a problem. They're already handing Microsoft all of their company email, their documents, their spreadsheets, etc. and paying Microsoft for the privilege. MS doesn't care at all about consumers.

Was it? WOW64 runs 32-bit software fine enough. Or are you talking about 16-bit applications?

MS is now competing against businesses that see their users as profit centers. (Google, Meta, Apple)

Windows was never going to go another way than this.

Users who care about hardware and/or software freedom should be on linux.

They can just require hash of legacy binaries sent to Microsoft and rubberstamped back. Eventually they'll have a near comprehensive list of legacy binaries in common use, and move to block unknown binaries in circulation as "malware".

Microsoft basically already has this (and has for the last ~20 years) as SmartScreen.

When was the last time you opened your start menu?