The problem is that they just could not commit to anything for more than 2 years after Win32.

They had something reasonably good in WinRT. They should have stuck to that. But Nadella came in, said Azure Cloud is the future and abandoned the Windows platform.

At this point one must ask if Microsoft is still a software platform company - whether their products form a substrate where an ecosystem can form and build a coherent software environment for the users of their platform.

Microsoft used to be the Windows company (after being the BASIC company, then the DOS company). Then it became the Office company. Now it’s SharePoint and Office365 and Azure, a utility. Windows is a relatively small part. Office is both desktop and web (and spacecraft, where they have two versions of Outlook and none of them works). If you are confused at this point, so am I. There is no vision as to what Microsoft is. If Satya Nadella knows what Microsoft is, he isn’t communicating it properly. It’s not Azure, because there is also Office and Windows. And on-prem server products. And a line of hardware products. And stores (do they still exist?).

MS has never been a software platform company. That's the fundamental reason behind the issue the article talks about.

MS has always been a software application company. Windows was never anything more than a way to sell MS applications--and Windows 3.0 and later wouldn't even have existed in the first place if IBM hadn't dawdled so long over OS/2. Even in the MS-DOS days, when MS was reaping the benefits of IBM's previous bonehead decision to hand the PC OS market to them, MS was selling Office applications--on the Macintosh.

The basic Windows API, in all of its many incarnations, has always been a second-class citizen; MS Office applications have always done their own things that other Windows applications couldn't do without using undocumented features that MS could change at any time (and often did). One could argue that the only reason MS even allowed third-party Windows developers to exist was so that they would, in the words of one of PG's essays, do market research for MS. When a third-party dev came up with something that got enough traction, MS would simply incorporate it into their apps.

How do you reconcile this with their history of bending over backwards to achieve backwards compatibility for third parties?

This makes sense, because even in the best times Windows was not the biggest money maker for Microsoft, it was Office. So MS was never fully behind Windows, it was only the means to an end, which was selling the most software for enterprises.

Ironically, Office was the original poster child for Microsoft reinventing it's own widget toolkits, even back when Microsoft had a coherent visual design and developer story.

Microsoft has always had a broad vision of itself as a technology company; I feel it's perfectly fine to not be able to describe Microsoft in one sentence without using platitudes like "empower every person on Earth to achieve more" or "put a computer in every home and every office" (both paraphrases of actual MSFT company mission statements), and I suspect many other current and former Microsoft employees would feel the same way.

IMO Microsoft's best long-lived products have always been both finished solutions to your problems and platforms to help you develop more solutions, and Microsoft leadership has always recognized this. Examples: Windows. Office. Dynamics (their Salesforce competitor).

But even if a product doesn't meet that "why not both?" ideal, there is always going to be room for it at Microsoft, as long as it is not only a good or at least mediocre product by itself, but also works to sell you on the whole Microsoft ecosystem. Sometimes that is a bad thing (see all the Windows adware for Bing, Copilot, and M365). But that at least is where Microsoft remains consistent.

> "put a computer in every home and every office"

That was such an amazing mission statement. It was a real measurable goal, and progress towards it was quantifiable. And Microsoft actually did it! That mission statement drove actual strategies (lower costs, don't complete with Apple on the high end, force OEMs to compete against each other on price, etc) that resulted in its ultimate fulfillment.

Nadella thought he could take the reins and start yelling “Cloud! Cloud! Cloud!” and that would be successful. He doesn’t have a strategy and now that’s becoming apparent.

He had a strategy and it worked very well. But every strategy must be updated. It's basic BCG matrix stuff every MBA graduate knows by heart: sooner or later your star product becomes a cash cow and then a dog. To keep your company growing, you need to identify your next potential stars among question marks, boost them with cash from the cash cows, put competent managers in charge and remove those who get in the way.

Gates did this with Windows, Office, XBox among other things. Ballmer failed to do this this with Windows Phone. Nadella did it with Azure, but he needs to do it once again with AI. You can see that he's pushing hard with Copilots everywhere, what's missing is a manager that has a coherent vision of what AI at MS should look like. ScottGu is in charge of both Azure and AI at MS, but I don't know if he can deliver.

Nadella took the reins in 2014 and the stock has 10x’d since then. In the same timeframe, the sp500 has 2.5x’d. Sounds pretty successful to me?

In theory, the market should be pricing in based on future potential. As it has become increasingly clear this past decade, the market is not rational.

Sure, but how much of that had to do with the design and implementation of Windows? You know, the OS that runs half of the modern economy. Microsoft is just milking it without a coherent vision.

Maybe financially MS is successful but at the cost of flagship product becoming adware and people fleeing slowly away

In a bubble, everyone looks like they’re doing well. Don’t confuse that with an actual strategy.

But I compared it to sp500. Even QQQ only 6x’d in that timeframe.

Which bubble are you talking about? Even if you remove everything after January 1 2020, it’s still up 4x since nadella took over. And that follows a decade of stagnation under Balmer.

What numbers do you know of that show that Microsoft hasn’t been successful since nadella took charge?

Complain all you want about the products, but the stock under nadella has been a success.

If your only metric is stock price, yes. That’s the value proposition of enshittification.

Stock price going up is not the success criterion for a business. Making money is. And Microsoft's decisions are undermining their ability to make money in the future, which makes them bad decisions even if the stock price has gone up or if they make more money in the short term.

> Stock price going up is not the success criterion for a business. Making money is.

Microsoft’s net income is up roughly 5.4x from ~$22B in 2014 to $119B today. Profit margin also expanded, from ~25% net margins in 2014 to over 36% today.

If the market agreed, the stock wouldn’t go up.

Cloud is now massively larger than any other part of Microsoft. It's why he became the CEO in the first place.

He maybe never had a strategy for Windows but he wasn't hired to have a strategy for Windows.

WinRT was technologically terrible (which immediately flows from "no one at Microsoft was actually using it to make anything useful"). But that wasn't even what sunk it - the whole requirements around "of course your WinRT app is going to be in the Microsoft Store^TM its the future" did that. The fucking store is a joke, and those requirements existed solely to boost a bunch of idiots internal careers.

Correct for the Windows 8 and 8.1 initial versions, it was already quite good with UWP on Windows 10.

But then they rioted internally to kill C++/CX (the only time they had something comparable to C++ Builder), Project Reunion got announced and misused from the original goal, porting WinRT back into Win32 killed .NET Native as well, most of the key team members left to Amazon and Google, Azure or AI teams, the team is now mostly interns or juniors from Microsoft India, no direction, and is a mess, naturally.

I went from a WinRT advocate, to pointing out devs to stay away from it, this is how bad they treated those that actually believed WinRT could be it.

Part of the reason was that WinRT was aimed at tablets and other low power devices, where unrestricted Win32 API use could drain the battery too quickly. They were trying to put the genie back in the bottle to have more control in this new ecosystem, like Apple enjoyed on iPad, etc. Much of the weird signing and app store evaluation was to make sure your app used only the blessed APIs and wouldn't, for example, stay awake in the background listening on an arbitrary port and drain the little tablet battery.

Painful and nonsensical from a desktop standpoint but also kind of impressive in a way.

The Windows Store thing was so terrible that I would argue the only good thing that came out of it was that it made Valve/Steam invest in Linux.

I still don't understand why the windows store search sucked so badly. It isn't like they had billions of apps. So why did it suck?

Most probably it was on purpose. MS is famous for the infighting of internal groups and how the management doesn't know how to control their divisions.

My favorite example of that was when WinRT app .exe files could not be launched from the command line. Only via some Windows Store voodoo dance with approvals, signatures and "security" that made WinRT for developers essentially a dead-on-arrival technology.

I would not be surprised if you still cannot launch a fricking .exe.

This was sorted out in Windows 10 with the unification of WinRT programming models under UWP.

> What changed is he took the mask off.

I think long-term drug use changed his brain and turned him bad.

These randoms not only host U.S. bases supplying logistics for the attacks on Iran, but were are launch pads for missiles https://www.wsj.com/world/iran-war-land-missile-strikes-22ca... until Iran ensured the launch sites were destroyed

"Videos verified by Storyful, which is owned by News Corp, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, indicate that at least some of the launches came from Bahrain, the tiny kingdom just 125 miles across the Gulf from Iran."

The air bases are still being used as launch pads for drone strikes and chopper missions.

This, plus a history of conflicts between various Persian dynasties and their Arabian neighbors that predate the existence of the US by over 1,000 years.

> Poor people in the US live like gods compared to people living in 3rd world jungles, but they complain just as much if not more.

May have been true once upon a time, but true no longer.

Even with nukes, you won't get rid of 90 million hornets in a mountainous and hilly nation.

The remaining hornets would re-associate with other groups, like kurds, etc. and no longer consider themselves subjects of Iran.

Hah, wishful thinking that. If your family is wiped out by invaders, you will vow vengeance till either their death or yours.

If that were true statistically speaking you'd see a lot more post-war violence, after vietnam war, Iraq war, ...

In truth, the bereaved will surely be angry at the bombs dropped by party X, but at the same time understand the impatience of party X towards government Y that oppressed both you and your dead family.

There is much more room for regret: regret of not openly supporting saner voices, regret of taking what seemed to be the least personally risky path, until the final conclusion proved otherwise...

Allowing your government to rot to the core and pretending citizens do not carry any responsibility is what leads to things like Nazi germany, Iran, etc...

You are definitely seeing a lot more post-war violence after the American-induced wars of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Lebanon, etc. You can check the statistics yourself - there IS a structural increase in conflicts. The world is seeing more simultaneous conflicts than in decades. Most of which can be laid at feet of U.S. & Israel.

The War against Iran is the most stupid conflict I have seen instigated by the U.S. Your quote of "regret of not openly supporting saner voices" should be directed at the U.S. & Israel since they launched this war. There was no cause for it except for distracting from the Epstein files and any blackmail material held by Israel.

You said

> Hah, wishful thinking that. If your family is wiped out by invaders, you will vow vengeance till either their death or yours.

And then changed the supposed vengeance across oceans into local vengeance when asked for evidence.

You don't go to war against a nation with a happy population: it generates a whole nation of enemies.

If you only go to war against a nation with unhappy populations, you will probably leave them as unhappy as you found them, but hopefully they can start taking matters in their own hands...

> And then changed the supposed vengeance across oceans into local vengeance when asked for evidence.

Obviously it is local vengeance. And the U.S. DEEPLY fears it, no matter how many times Hegseth thumps his chest and bloviates.

Why do you think U.S. troops evacuated from all their bases and now hiding using Gulf citizens as human shields ? Because they know if they stay, they will die messily.

Why did all the aircraft carriers pulled back ? Because of "Laundry fires" ? Even the Abraham Lincoln pulled back >1000km away. Because they know if they stay, they will be sunk.

Why do you think Trump doesn't dare a ground invasion or open the Strait of Hormuz? Because the commanders know that U.S. troops will die messily in an orgy of vengeance, no matter if Trump declares the U.S. has "won" the war 20+ times.

Why do you think Trump doesn't evacuate the nuclear material - the piss-poor excuse for the war - using a special operation ? Because the commanders know that U.S. troops in any such operation will be slaughtered messily.

Why do you think Israel is taking far more casualties now after 2023 compared to earlier decades ? Because people don't really care if they live or die as long as they can take down an IDF soldier who killed their family, including children. Now Israel is losing Merkava tanks like flies in Lebanon.

Feel free to Cope Harder with your irrational and nonsensical arguments about "unhappy populations"

You keep changing the claims, you claimed that when people have lost their family under bombardments that they tend to swear vengeance against "the invader", countless people have lost family in the countless wars in the middle east say Iraq war, Afghanistan, etc.

Very few went to american soil to attack americans.

You ignore they didn't like people like Saddam either, Iraq is not currently in some Saddam whorship cult situation. They recognize Saddam was a dictator, and recognize the deaths of many friends and family was not the monocausal result of US bombardments. They recognize that if only they had toppled Saddam as a local population, and halted the programs adversarial to international community, it might have been avoided.

In the absence of the evidence to your claims you changed it to local violence, which certainly exists, but thats much rather local militia's or terror organizations that were sponsored by Iran. Consider how even Hamas has called on Iran to stop bombing neighbor countries indiscriminately.

We all saw how "happy" your Iranian population was during the protests that directly preceded the US/Israel attacks. We saw how the population in Iran was enjoying some good old police brutality. We saw how those protests started with Mahsa Amini's death. Something broke in Iran. People realized a government murdering their daughter with hydrogen cyanide over at the fashion police is not a desirable government. There is nothing irrational or nonsensical about calling such a population unhappy. They risked and many lost their lives to express opinions.

Whenever there are 2 excuses, none of them are correct: I see explanations from Epstein files, to compromat by Israel to insider trading, ... you ascribe too much power to a president and not enough to deep state actors.

The U.S. President took the call to war. He bears the responsibility.

Nobody is interested in your monocausal scapegoat theories.

> Iran is only burning additional bridges with it's neighbors..

If you are permitting your airspace to carry out continual bombing campaigns causing massive casualties and also host enemy bases, then the "bridges" have already been burnt and you are a belligerent in the War.

> If this happens and Cuba decides to launch drones/missiles against the US homeland,

Cuba is not stupid. They will attack the infamous Conquistador Torture Base on their soil and US ships that carry out high piracy of their trade vessels.

C++ builds are extremely slow because they are not correct.

I'm doing a migration of a large codebase from local builds to remote execution and I constantly have bugs with mystery shared library dependencies implicitly pulled from the environment.

This is extremely tricky because if you run an executable without its shared library, you get "file not found" with no explanation. Even AI doesn't understand this error.

The dynamic linker can clearly tell you where it looks for files and in which order, and where it finds them if it does.

You can also very easily harden this if you somehow don't want to capture libraries from outside certain paths.

You can even build the compiler in such a way that every binary it produces has a built-in RPATH if you want to force certain locations.

That is what I'm doing so I can get distributed builds working. It sucks and has taken me days of work.

It's pretty simple and works reliably as specified.

I can only infer that your lack of familiarity was what made it take so long.

Rebuilding GCC with specs does take forever, and building GCC is in general quite painful, but you could also use patchelf to modify the binary after the fact (which is what a lot of build systems do).

> I can only infer that your lack of familiarity was what made it take so long

Pretty much.

Trying to convert an existing build that doesn't explicitly declare object dependencies is painful. Rust does it properly by default.

For example, I'm discovering our clang toolchain has a transitive dependency on a gcc toolchain.

Clang cannot bootstrap in the same way GCC can; you need GCC (or another clang) to build it. You can obviously build it twice to have it be built by itself (bear in mind some of the clang components already do this, because they have to be built by clang).

In general though, a clang install will still depend on libstdc++, libgcc, GCC crtbegin.o and binutils (at least on Linux), which is typically why it will refer to a specific GCC install even after being built.

There are of course ways to use clang without any GCC runtime, but that's more involved and non-standard (unless you're on Mac).

And there is also the libc dependency (and all sysroot aspects in general) and while that is usually considered completely separate from GCC, the filesystem location and how it is found is often tied to how GCC is configured.

The Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter missions would beg to differ.

(And "absolute" or other adjectives don't qualify "correctness"... it simply is or isn't.)

Remap Capslock to Esc. Possible in every OS now.