Ask Paul: October 24 ⭐

Happy Friday! Here’s another great set of reader questions to kick off the weekend a bit early.
✍️ It’s always a series of mistakes
louiem3 asks:

Hi Paul, any plans on doing or continuing another Programming series or something like it related to Windows? The last one you did was a good one!

Thanks ... yes, I have worked on and off on an expansion and possible reworking of the Programming Windows series, which turned into the book Windows Everywhere. The expansion would/will include the Windows 10 years at the least, but also some other content bits throughout. But the reworking idea is stuck in the back of my brain because I feel like the existing series/book may be a little off-putting to non-developers/technical people even though I feel like a lot of it would be of interest to a broader audience otherwise.

When I started that, it was as described, a look at the various Windows application development frameworks/SDKs that Microsoft came up with over the years and the mistakes and successes that happened along the way. But as I reexamined those things chronologically, a different kind of narrative presented itself. And I started to think about it more in terms of the broader strategies for Windows and how it and Microsoft either reacted to industry trends or defined them. And I became semi-obsessed with a topic that matters quite a bit to me, which is when it all went south. That is, the moment in time when Windows was the most relevant thing in personal computing and then suddenly wasn’t.

That moment is described in Programming Windows: Civil War (Premium). Microsoft had committed to recasting Windows with web technologies, which has strong parallels to what’s happening now with Windows 11 and AI, and how Microsoft wants to reimagine the platform as being agentic and “AI native,” which is a nonsense term. But an internal battle over that direction (in the very late 1990s) led to Microsoft reversing that decision and going back to what had worked in the past: It embraced and extended open web technologies into a proprietary platform it called .NET. And that was the end. Windows never recovered as an app platform. This is basically the conclusion of the series even though I wrote it in the middle in Programming Windows: We Fought the Web and the Web Won (Premium).

Anyway, because of the way I wrote the series, these things only became obvious in time and I feel like I could/should rewrite it with that perspective in mind. And maybe to make it less technical.

But the parallels between events in different time periods are always interesting to me, and the decision to protect the cash cow at all costs was a classic short-sightedness mistake, and you can see this happening today with Apple and its App Store policies and refusing to concede to what is obviously the right thing to do. Not being able to change will eventually bite us all on the backside. Especially when those in charge are so convinced they’re right.

Beyond...