Programming Windows: Overpromise, Underdeliver (Premium)

Despite its massive successes in the 1990s, Microsoft was always considered a third-rate technology company by its jealous rivals. This was galling to Bill Gates and his employees, given the company’s history and its creation of the most successful software ecosystem in the industry.

But Microsoft’s critics had a point. After all, Microsoft’s developer tools were mostly terrible. BASIC was a toy language and, yes, Visual Basic was innovative and fun, but professional developers quickly ran into its limits and, after all, Microsoft had acquired it from a third party anyway. The Win32 Windows API was notoriously terrible and hard to use, and Microsoft’s conversion to the 32-bit world was a missed opportunity for cleaning up that API. Microsoft’s first attempt at an object-oriented wrapper over Win32, the C++-based Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), was an industry joke thanks to its bloated, hard-to-read code. Rival firms like Borland created better and more sophisticated developer tools. And Sun Microsystems---Sun, of all companies---had created an elegant and modern developer environment called Java that Microsoft had been forced to license to gain some traction in the emerging online world it was so worried about at the end of the 20th century.

In many ways, the Windows of the 1990s paralleled the iPhone of the 2010s, where the product succeeded at dominating the competition despite the terrible tools and languages that developers were forced to master to create compatible apps. But Gates always wanted to change that dynamic, both in appearance and reality. And you can see the ongoing campaign for developer legitimacy in such things as Windows NT, COM/DCOM/COM+, and then the Windows Foundation Classes (WFC), Microsoft’s first truly elegant and clean framework for developers.

That Gates had to look outside of Microsoft to make WFC happen is, perhaps, not surprising. But his poaching of Borland’s resident genius Anders Hejlsberg would pay heady dividends even after Sun sued Microsoft for violating its licensing terms with Java, effectively killing WFC. Thanks to Sun’s shortsightedness, Hejlsberg and others went on to create the .NET platform for Microsoft, including the .NET Framework and the C# programming language. And with that, Gates finally had the sophisticated and elegant developer environment that Microsoft had always lacked.

The problem, of course, was that Gates was still Gates. And in his excitement over this new technically sophisticated Microsoft, it is clear today that Gates and his company overreached when they communicated what they could deliver in .NET and the many internal products and services this technology would influence. This wasn’t entirely uncommon---Microsoft had overpromised and underdelivered many times in the past---but it would prove to be particularly problematic in the .NET era as the hype got ahead of reality repeatedly.

Microsoft’s initial introduction of .NET was confu...