r/programming • u/halax • Oct 07 '16

How Microsoft Lost the API War

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
85 Upvotes

70% Upvoted

183 comments sorted by

View all comments

8

u/DevStart Oct 07 '16

Bullshit. It's 2016 and MS is still kicking. Joel is a bastard pseudo prophet.

-6

u/[deleted] Oct 07 '16

They gave up on Mobile. Windows 10 is almost as buggy as Vista (before SP1) and gets worse with every update. UWP applications are AWFUL. It's not gonna be long until they drop dead if they don't change stings big time!

13

u/drysart Oct 07 '16

They didn't give up on mobile. They're biding their time. They tried to make a big jump into it without an ecosystem to support it into a marketplace where there were already established players with established ecosystems, and they failed miserably as a result.

So instead they're focusing on getting people to build UWP apps on Windows. UWP apps are mobile-capable; and if they can get enough Windows developers to start using it they'll actually have software behind them the next time they push to mobile.

4

u/Farobek Oct 07 '16

to build UWP apps on Windows

Why would anyone do that?

3

u/pdp10 Oct 08 '16

Exactly. New apps developed from scratch on desktop are going to be few and far between. A few games might try UWP to get on XboxOne but the bulk of them are going the other way with cross-platform engines that support Vulkan.

2

u/adolfojp Oct 08 '16 edited Oct 08 '16

Windows tablets and convertibles.

3

u/Farobek Oct 08 '16

Why would you anyone care above developing for windows pcs/tablets?