Ask Paul: December 22 (Premium)

Happy Holidays! And welcome to a mammoth, pre-Christmas edition of Ask Paul with some terrific reader questions. I’ve done my best.
Ghost of Windows past
hastin asks:

I'm going to propose three "A Windows Carole" questions:

Ghost of Windows Past: What defining thing do you think the Windows platform did to get it at the point and mindset it has today?

The Windows we use today is a direct result/descendant of Windows 8, with which the Windows team of the day understood that modernizing the platform by adopting the best of mobile was the correct way forward but then completely botched the implementation. But this was the release in which Windows proper was first ported to Arm (derivatives like Windows CE were by nature subsets, not “real” Windows), and this was the beginning of the shift to focus on efficiency rather than raw performance, which had long ceased being an issue.

The mistakes of Windows 8, of course, are many. Microsoft could/should have adopted the Windows Phone app platform and store rather than basically redoing that work, but Steven Sinofsky’s hatred of .NET and the team’s arrogance toward what they viewed as the “B team” working on Phone were the primary drivers for not doing so. And to be fair to this group, Windows Phone was rushed out the door, and it ended up changing the software platform three times after the initial Silverlight-based release. But had Windows adopted Silverlight right then, we would be in a better place today, and the “One Windows” push that belatedly started later with Windows 10 might just have established itself as a third viable mobile platform. It’s painful to even think about how dumb this team’s decisions were, and how they set back Windows, possibly forever.

The Phone-based Myerson team that came in afterwards made some great decisions, like returning the focus to the desktop and the PC used by the existing 1+ billion user base. But they tried to evolve the Windows 8 app platform, with UWP and One Windows (singular app platform across phones, tablets, PCs, Xbox, HoloLens, Surface Hub, etc.), and lost years of time trying to build bridges that developers could use to bring other codebases to Windows. All of this work failed, and then it lost even more years unrolling it while pretending they weren’t doing so. And the net results, the Windows App SDK, is only there so developers can move their apps forward to newer technologies like WinUI 3. No sane developer would ever create a new Windows-only app with this library.

And here we are: Modern new Windows apps are no longer Windows-only, they are cross-platform (or at least could be) and built with web technologies or frameworks like Flutter and .NET MAUI that target multiple platforms.

Ghost of Windows Present: Do you feel that Windows is on the "right track", right now?

Hm.

For the most part, I don’t feel that Windows is on any track, really. And what Microsoft is doing with Windows these da...