It really shows that Microsoft doesn't hold themselves up to a high standard. They make all this noise about AI PCs and a new (!!!) Copilot key, only to deliver... not much. Where are the adults in the room who have the guts to say "let's have a cohesive story and do this the right way?"
I suspect they think their customers are so dumb that they'll be wowed by the same Malibu Stacy doll with a new hat (!!!).
Microsoft has never had a cohesive story, they've had a cohesive brand. From 'Windows' to '.NET' to 'Azure' to 'CoPilot', it's always been about slamming the new buzzword trademark onto everything, regardless of it's relation to the prior thing with similar name.
Yeah like when they branded Skype on everything and we had to do a whole campaign to educate our users that Lync is now Skype but nothing has actually changed and it's not actually compatible with the real Skype in any way, it's just empty vacuous branding crap.
I really hate dealing with Microsoft.
Now with the CoPilot 365 stuff they're selling us something like it's the best thing in the world when really it's only a barely beta quality product that really shouldn't have made it to market yet.
The fact that Co-Pilot 365 is unable to directly search or reference current Microsoft documentation on their Learn site or any of the support articles and just tells you to go look that up yourself is annoying.
I understand the major selling point is it’s ability to search through your emails, team messages, meeting notes/transcripts, and SharePoint/OneDrive documents for information is not as useful as it could be because I can’t get it to find me information in my OneNote doc without giving it the documents and even then it usually just tells me to ask the person who last edited the file.
Why? While Balmer's products weren't market conquering smash hits (Xbox 360, Zune, Windows Phone 7) but they also weren't full of anti-user features, ads and spyware like those launched under Nadella.
Balmer seemed to at least care a bit about (windows) developers and how products were received by the consumers which is why he spent 1,5 Billion on fixing the red ring of death issue to save the Xbox, only for Microsoft to run it into the ground today under Nadella. How many people do you know who would want to buy Xbox today?
The way I see it, Balmer was better for the products, Nadella was better at increasing the share price, but the way Boeing proved it, you can have stock increases even if your products are going to shit once you nearly monopolize a market.
Microsoft feels like it's now really just two divisions: the one that makes lots of money and the one that is thrashing around desperately trying to find income streams to justify their continued existence. The latter division likely lives in fear of the day that they're ejected from the company, either as a spinoff or sold to another company, so they have tons of motivation to find new revenue streams, even at the potential cost of damaging the corporate brand.
Don't forget the Xbox/gaming parts, seemingly completely divorced from the rest of MS, and flailing about for years now, buying up every game company they can afford.
Judging by the modern Windows apps, that seems true as most of them (ClipChamp, Weather, News, etc) are just web apps with an Edge wrapper similar to Electron apps.
I'd get it if they were meant to be cross platform apps, but they're not. Crazy they couldn't have bothered to write native windows apps in .NET/C# for something that's obviously meant to be Windows exclusive. The community writes way better Windows apps (Sumatra, Notepad++, etc) than Microsoft does internally.
Microsoft has no cohesive product vision for the OS and just seems to let various groups slap random low quality shit to the OS, based on some internal power struggles their managers win in the org I assume. It's ironic that low quality slop like those and ads ship by default with the OS, but the truly useful and high quality utilities they write like PowerToys, do not.
They lost the plot on their core audience after Windows 7 and sloppy implementations of "AI" like Copilot+ and Recall won't bring them back, on the contrary, it convinces people to GTFO to Linux ASAP.
They do, there is just no top-down initiative that says "use WinUI with C# or lose your job, make sure to throw out React Native and WebView2 by the end of this quarter". That would at least cover Windows. Or they could force everyone adopt MAUI internally instead, despite its flaws (if you dogfood something heavily, bugs get fixed fast).
I find it funny that, unlike OneDrive, iCloud desktop client uses WinUI.
But I'm not holding my breath and think that whoever could make this reality was pushed out of the relevant teams or the org as a whole by the time W11 shipped - just look how they killed great OneNote UWP variant. Salvaging the situation would be an improbable miracle.
> At this time, there are two generations of WinUI: WinUI 2 for UWP and WinUI in the Windows App SDK (WinUI 3). While both can be used in production-ready apps on Windows 10 and later, each have different development targets.
In the Microsoft land it's always utterly confusing to get started. You are always left guessing what choice to make.
>In the Microsoft land it's always utterly confusing to get started. You are always left guessing what choice to make.
Not it isn't. What you're pointing out is the PRO of Windows, not a CON. It's why backwards compatibility works so well. If you have a super old app you're still developing, you can keep using that old UI stack, no need to rewrite it on a newer one just for ti to be compatible with the latest Windows release.
I feel like most people complainant about the different UI stacks supported by Windows, are not Windows developers but just enjoy pointing it out as if it bothers them somehow through sheer existence even though they never wrote any Windows apps.
The Windows developers community are pissed off with how badly WinRT was managed since Windows 8.
There is seldom anyone of us that went through that, and will advise anyone to use WinUI 3.0, unless they themselves have a sunken cost into UWP, and need a way out.
Quite easy to find out in the endless discussions on the related Github repos.
Because like many in the Windows developer community, Microsoft has ripped us off with all the mess they have made with WinRT since 2012, multiple rewrites, broken tooling, dropped features.
And worse of all, in the end, those of us doing WinRT advocacy, were the ones answering for Microsoft's missteps in customer meetings.
Too many hard feelings to let it go just like that.
In this regard, as already discussed before, it what saddens me that Apple and Google are more willing to double down on their UI stacks, Android and iDevices, than Microsoft.
If one of them was at the steering wheel of Longhorn, it would most likely been shipped with its .NET based architecture, improved in later releases, and everyone that wasn't into it, could have looked for a job elsewhere.
I suspect they forgot the value of internal training on their own platform’s tech and they just hire folks from outside and let them run wild, and all they know how to do is React, so that’s basically what we get.
>It's ironic that low quality slop like those and ads ship by default with the OS... it convinces people to GTFO to Linux ASAP.
It certainly convinced me. Steam Proton runs pretty much all the games I enjoy (mainly indies), and I can quarantine Windows in a VM for MS Office, as well as keep a full Windows installation on a separate disk if I really need it (rarely).
The crap that's made its way into mainline Windows makes me feel like my computer isn't serving me anymore.
My understanding is that it takes orders of magnitude longer to develop native Windows applications than it does to develop webapps. I think that your suspicion is right and that some PM along the way was able to make the business case that we could ship 75% of the product using 10% of the engineering resources.
It's a drag, though, because as everyone will immediately see, having a shortcut on your keyboard to open glorified GPT-4 isn't really a killer feature.
Well that's just the thing, I would assume there are significantly more web developers in the market than developers with experience writing Windows apps of a high enough quality to be shipped in the OS.
You also need to follow all the Windows guidelines pattern here.... The only choice for this for a while was WinUI/UWP. And there isn't a lot of WinUI/UWP devs.
My understanding is that it takes orders of magnitude longer to develop native Windows applications than it does to develop webapps.
If you know what you are doing, not at all. That being said the technologies are quite different and not all skills are transferrable. If you're an experienced web developer, then transferring to writing Windows apps takes a bit of getting used to. Once you've wrapped your head around C#, Visual Studio and WPF or WinUI3, and embraced the Window Way, it's actually a quite productive environment.
What I suspect we might be seeing is that Windows has so thoroughly lost the developer mindshare battle, that not even Microsoft can find experienced Windows devs to hire, and most of their new developers have a web first programming background and have never used any of the Windows GUI frameworks.
That's essentially I'm suggesting. I totally agree that in a world where one's team is made up of highly skilled C# developers with lots of experience writing Windows apps, I'm sure productivity is fantastic.
In the world which 99% of software teams live in though, the former skillset is far, far rarer than the React/node/Vue etc. toolkit which is a dime a dozen these days. If a fresh team wants to from 0 to functioning product, I still stand by that they'll get it out the door _much_ faster using some agreed upon webstack than they would doing it the Windows Way. Hence the "orders of magnitude" phrasing which others are having trouble with.
For someone with no training on Windows tech, using no helper tools, but who has lots of experience using web tech, maybe. But not only is that not true with the right skills and tools, but these webapps don’t even have feature parity. If they can’t do everything a native app can do then it’s not even a comparison.
> takes orders of magnitude longer to develop native Windows applications than it does to develop webapps.
That seems extremely far-fetched to me. If it's for economic reasons, I think it's more likely related to availability of developers with webapp experience vs native experience.
Which they could easily solve if they invested in training new hires on their own internal tech, but I suspect that’s long been cut to the bone. So if you can only rely on what skills people have when they join, you’re going to dilute any proprietary tech you have.
It's precisely for economic reasons, hiring a qualified team being the long tail here. I assure you guys that it's much, much easier finding a team of decent web devs than a team of decent Windows devs. Is that really so far-fetched?
I assume you're right, but it's still quite absurd. Apple has recently released applications written natively in WinUI (iCloud for Windows). So Apple can more easily hire/train WinUI developers than Microsoft?
I'd accept the "difficulty" excuse from a company like Walmart. But we're talking about a (relatively) small number of built-in mini applications here, inside a tech-specialised company that created, maintains and presumably promotes this native framework.
They do not give an explanation but one can only imagine _what could have gotten wrong_ with giving some LLM admin access to the OS of a computer and changing settings through that.
Maybe M$ should fix their horrible windows settings UX which is a mesh of windows XP/7/10/11/whatever instead.
> _what could have gotten wrong_ with giving some LLM admin access to the OS of a computer and changing settings through that.
This is my biggest gripe with the MS Edge chatbot - it's cool I can just use Bing Chat with just a click, but holy hell I do not want it to have the ability to change my browser settings. The only time it has ever changed my settings has been when it misinterpreted what I was prompting
The way WinUI 3.0, WinAppSDK have progressed since Project Reunion announcement in 2020, is quite telling how resource contrained those teams are.
4 years later, still no designer, C++/WinRT will never have a VS tooling experience like C++/CX (and is actually in maintenaince), plenty of UWP features that are still missing from WinUI 3.0, Native AOT on .NET 9 might finally catch up to .NET Native, map component is now backed by a Webview2 and Bing maps,...
The latest Windows 11 is actually in a good state now for settings. Still took them unreasonably long to get here but I haven't needed to go into the old control panel in a long time.
Same. Windows 11 control panel feels now complete to me, way better than the Windows 10 one which had me always reaching out to the legacy control panel.
Could have been an Onion article. What next, every two years Microsoft announces a new keyboard where the only change is that some "useless" keys have been removed to make way for a bigger Copilot key?
this is what happens when the leadership wants you to ship something "good enough" out the door in a fear to not fall behind in whatever race they have conjured up in their minds.
this product on some levels, when looked at in isolation, feels as useless as did Rabbit's R1. However, Microsoft is a ginormous corporation, and hence can keep on throwing releases like these at the wall hoping something stick. The leaders will never learn, and I am sure, despite all the good points raised in this article, this release will be or is already being celebrated as a success within the internal circles.
The irony of decisions like this, is while WinUI 3.0 team still tries to sell WinUI as the framework for delightful Windows experiences, the remaining business units keep shipping Web stuff instead.
It died when Windows 8 came to be, I would say, not even Office was that keen in adopting WinRT.
Additionally, I think Microsoft "Developer, Developer, Developer" culture on Windows side, is kind of gone, as many key people went elsewhere, and got replaced by a newer generation without Windows development culture.
So now we get UNIX conventions all over the place, and teams that rather ship React Native and Webviews, instead of proper native frameworks.
On Windows 10 everything MSFT developed was UWP. They were basically banned to use anything else. The only thing that used old frameworks, were... old "legacy" components.And the old legacy components barely had updates because they avoid to touch.
WinUI (in part) was even born because of this. They already had internal XAML controls (DEPControls) for all their apps, and they decided to open-source and named WinUI. And then later they also wanted to open-source the UWP XAML stack and decouple from Windows updates, and that became WinUI 3.0.
Even on 11 launch, there was an attempt to continue with this effort, but well, it's Microsoft... they rewrote taskbar to be UWP (not WInUI 3!), because well, WinUI 3 was (and is) worse than UWP. On other apps, they didn't wanted to rewrite from scratch, because then you would break compat (File Explorer Shell extensions, context menu... etc), so they had a great idea to just mix old UI with WinUI!
So you have WinUI on Notepad, File Explorer, Paint, etc, but not in the entire of it. So they were trying to make things more consistent (and WinUI), and it only got worse because mixing the two added too much complexity, WinUI 3 is slower than UWP, etc.
So they started going web. Also because of budget reasons.
As for the rest, I was there for the ride since Windows 8, as I quite enjoyed .NET Native, C++/CX, and the idea WinRT being what .NET 1.0 should have been, as per Ext-VOS background.
Not related, AI feature would be accepted if M$ would not upload the data to their cloud and implement the stuff safely (the stuff was super unsafe)
My assumption is that id did not work as they imagined, maybe you coudl use it by saying "Open Resolution Settings" but it would fail when you change "Resolution" with "Network" os soemthing else because of the giant mess in Windows. Though from my experience the Assistant in Android is also useless to open the correct Setting screen and I still have to hunt the setting I need manually.
I suspect they think their customers are so dumb that they'll be wowed by the same Malibu Stacy doll with a new hat (!!!).