Ask Paul: January 31 (Premium)

Happy Friday! January was a slog that somehow went by in a breeze, but I'm happy to put it behind me. This is a great way to start.
? History repeats itself
JaviAl asks:

In the early 2000s, when Microsoft introduced the .NET Framework, it announced the migration of all its products to this technology: Windows .NET, Office .NET, etc., which was brought down by the Longhorn disaster ... After the reset, they put a ban on .NET in the development of the next version of Windows. They were prohibited from using .NET in all Windows development except Windows Media Player and games.

I literally just re-read this part of Steven Sinofsky's book, Hardcore Software, and strongly recommend that you--and anyone else reading this--buy the book and read it as well. It's quite insightful and, as important, is a first-hand account. But the short version of this history is that Microsoft went overboard in trying to compete with Java and the web as a platform by creating .NET a proprietary alternative to both and then proclaiming publicly that the entire company was going to pivot around this technology, down to the branding. Inside Office at the time, for example, they had no plans to integrate .NET in any meaningful way and were never going to "rewrite" the products in .NET, so they were as confused as anyone about that announcement.

But you ask about Windows. The reason .NET was dropped in Vista is that Microsoft only had 15–18 months to bring Vista to market after the reset, the Windows team was always firmly in the Win32 camp, they had to cobble together what they could from the mess of Longhorn off the floor, and they were confronted by a harsh reality: This thing was "bloated" from a resource usage perspective compared to XP and most existing PCs couldn't run Aero Glass. So the decision was made to remove .NET from Vista because managed code ran more slowly at the time and this code would slow down Vista on low-end (common) PCs of the day that otherwise met the hardware requirements. (Microsoft still ended up facing a class action lawsuit over "Windows Vista Ready" PCs.)

There were numerous side problems triggered by these side-by-side efforts. Microsoft stopped developing or updating Internet Explorer because .NET's Avalon technologies were going to replace HTML ... or something. And this would all be part of Longhorn. But then it wasn't, and Microsoft had to get that going again. It was a mess. But the goal was speed to market: Just get Vista out the door.

This decision had a chilling impact on developers who were adopting .NET because Microsoft had made it the center of its strategy and then quietly walked away from it in Vista. In the end, Vista wasn't Windows .NET, it was just like XP, Windows with the .NET Framework tacked on the side. For whatever it's worth, .NET did go on to "win" temporary against Java on the server, and the Server team at Microsoft embraced .NET wholeheartedly in ways the client team never did. The problems...