It is remarkable how during the last 25 years (approximately), Microsoft has been improving their ability to deliver first (or be among the first), followed by messing up the whole process so that late comers end up taking the crown jewels.

PDAs, mobile phones, tablets, tablets with detachable keyboards, managed OS userspace, HoloLens, the XBox mess, and now AI.

There certainly other examples that I failed to address.

This is what happens when divisions fight among themselves for OKRs and whatever other goals.

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exceptione 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And their philosophy of mediocre = good enough. (Not everything ofc, MS is a continent. .net core, language design etc is top-notch.)

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pjmlp 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Which certainly has to do with it being initially developed at Microsoft Research Cambridge, and not plain Microsoft.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40472977

https://web.archive.org/web/20190111203733/https://blogs.msd...

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exceptione 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Ah, thanks. That must be the link with Simon Peyton Jones as well. Seems to be another case of a marketing machine running away with foundational research coming from Europe.*

* no hard feelings

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brg 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I would argue that the success has more to do with DevDiv being the strongest technical organization at MS than its provenance.

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direwolf20 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I STILL REMEMBER WHEN SOME MARKETING IDIOT DECIDED THAT VISUAL STUDIO NEEDED TO SHOUT AT YOU. IT TOOK THREE MAJOR VERISONS BEFORE VISUAL STUDIO STOPPED LOOKING LIKE THIS COMMENT. OF COURSE THERE WASN'T A SETTING TO MAKE IT NORMAL AGAIN.

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pjmlp 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Until they messed up the whole UWP / WinRT developer experience in Visual Studio.

Also VS 2026 was released with a hard milestone, thus while there is a new settings experience, many options show a dialog from VS 2022, because the new UI is still not implemented for the new experience.

Note that most organisations have to pay for Visual Studio licenses, and get rewarded with such quality.

Slop has also arrived into DevDiv.

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PaulHoule 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I think after the failure of Metro, I think Microsoft gave up on native apps entirely and now the story is web or Electron.

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pjmlp 5 hours ago | parent [-]

It appears the problem is more deep than that.

From what I could infer from some community talks, podcasts and so, I would assert that nowadays they have the problem new hires have been educated in UNIX like OSes and Web.

Thus Windows team gets lots of folks that never coded anything for Windows, and management instead of having proper trainings in place, just goes with Webview2 and Electron all over the place.

I might be wrong, this is more my perception than anything else.

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MisterTea 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I would say the web took over as the primary application platform and Unix-likes provided convenient low cost license-free foundations to build them on.

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h3lp 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> nowadays they have the problem new hires have been educated in UNIX like OSes and Web.

So, in other words, the kids grow up learning and using Linux, right?

	▲	direwolf20 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Developers, at least. And Macs.

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codeulike 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But still, Microsoft is the most diversified of the big players - they have Windows, Office, Enterprise, Xbox, Azure, Surface - they can survive a mess like their current copilot mess and still generally thrive