Thinking (Again) About UWP and the Microsoft Store (Premium)

So, we need to discuss this week’s news about the end of ad-based UWP app monetization through the Microsoft Store. And you may be surprised by my take on this event given my previous editorials about these two topics.

First, a bit of background.

As you must know, Microsoft has been scaling back its original strategies for both UWP (Universal Windows Platform) and the Microsoft Store for years, though the cataclysmic news of last year triggered the first serious handwringing. And that news was a one-two punch: Internally, Microsoft’s decision-makers decided that its UWP mobile app strategy was “dead” (their word), paving the way for technology that was previously locked into UWP to be used with other developer frameworks. And the firm is working to remove the Microsoft Store as a requirement for distributing so-called Store apps (which include UWP apps, but also a wide range of other app types).

Both of those decisions are about-faces when compared to the previous strategies. But both also mark long-overdue admissions from Microsoft that its original strategies were not working.

To be fair to Microsoft, nothing it’s tried in the client developer space has worked for about 20 years now. And that’s interesting, because if you divide the history of Windows into two eras, as I have in my Programming Windows series of articles, you’ll see that the first period, which we might think of as classical Windows, was one of epic growth and change. And that the second period, the .NET period, was one of defeat, developer indifference, and the rise of platforms like mobile and the web that Microsoft does not control.

It’s not all bad, of course. The other way you could view these two eras is by sophistication, and while the .NET era has not been as successful for Microsoft as was classical Windows, it is still more sophisticated and thus “better” for developers. It’s just that the world has moved on, and nothing Microsoft has tried to reverse those trends has worked.

And not just recently. Yes, UWP and the Microsoft Store are failures. But so, too, were the .NET Framework, VB.NET, and Windows Forms, in 2002. The Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) in 2006. And then each generation of what eventually became UWP, starting with Metro in 2012. And lots of other things in-between that, frankly, I’ve simply forgotten about for the most part, or are trying to, like Silverlight and Windows Phone (2010). Whatever. It’s all failed.

Looking at the original vision for UWP and the Microsoft Store (both of which had different names at their inception, interestingly), you can easily Monday Morning Quarterback the “why” of those failures: UWP is a mobile platform shoehorned into a desktop OS and is not as sophisticated as the frameworks that preceded it. And the Microsoft Store was originally designed to only house this weird type of app and, worse, to be the only place from which developers could distribute such app...

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