The rest of Microsoft might go the same way. I guess now I know what it felt like looking at IBM in 1989.
https://www.livescience.com/technology/computing/ibm-will-bu...
(Check attached papers)
Google is strictly in research mode, but doing a lot of good, hard work.
The fact IBM still exists and is an important company is irrelevant. They lost control of the de facto computing standard. Microsoft could lose control as well.
I'm not sure I would have liked a world where IBM continued to control so much - we probably would have a much smaller open ecosystem.
A couple of quotes from the article above:
"WebView2-based Microsoft Teams consistently uses 1-2GB of RAM while doing nothing. Microsoft likely doesn’t know how to make these web apps use fewer resources, so it’s instead moving Teams calling to a separate process to reduce crashes."
"But Teams is not the only web app causing trouble when RAM prices are about to soar, as we also have WhatsApp. When WhatsApp debuted on Windows, it was an Electron app. However, Meta later upgraded it to WinUI/XAML (also known as native code on Windows), and WhatsApp eventually became one of the best apps [... using] less than 200MB of RAM and had smoother animations and faster load times."
It seems that most developers these days focus on web-exclusive technologies and try to force desktop and system level programs into this paradigm.
C, C++, and C# programmers seem to be as rare as hens teeth today?
Are colleges and universities not teaching these languages anymore? Is this a symptom of 'cloud-first' strategies where its easier to 'just use JavaScript' for everything, perhaps developer laziness/reluctance to learn another 'lower level' language?
I really don't understand the appeal of web-centric languages like JavaScript and TypeScript in the desktop and systems realm when they lack a standard library (which genuinely scares me: supply chain attacks...), likely contributing to the RAM consumption issue as developers just keep piling packages on for one specific function missing in another imported library, and aren't natively compilable to small binaries that aren't dependent on a runtime or bulky embedded interpreter.
Yes, C# technically falls afoul of this (in .NET), but C# at least has a standard library that is comprehensive and is supported by an enterprise (Microsoft, for all its faults), not random developers on the internet.
Microsoft allowing key components of Windows 11 to be rewritten in web-wrappers is only going to drive people further into Linux, as the RAM affordability crisis continues.
If it’s not the colleges and universities, you can bet the AIs are better trained on JS/TS.
That's the line that was told for 15 years.
Developers focus on web because that's where the money is. Who would want to go down the Desktop road when it's less money and a dying field?
Similarly, IMO for making UIs, declarative is the way to go. A lot of these UI Desktop frameworks are procedural, which is a drag to write for UIs, and also, has many times less the size and support that, say, React, does.
Another thing is that hardware is always getting better. There is no incentive to increase performance if no one complains. A vocal minority of tech guys raving about how Electron apps are resource hogs don't dictamine what's performant and what's not.
In a time when some of Satya Nadella's chickens are coming home to roost and Windows being the most obvious example and most of their AI things quickly approaching too, it's good to laugh at their stupidity as a consolation prize.
In the past Microsoft fucked up some many times but they had the absolute dominance of the market and a huge pool of talent and knowledgeable people capable of making them try again and win. Times have changed, many have retired or been layoff to give way for the next round of "cheap young" talent in the form of contract workers.
Now they have the Cloud, I'm not so sure the Windows division can turn this turd around this time. Xbox has tangentially been the canary.