I was skimming a
rant
by someone on arstechnica about how badly messed up Win32 APIs are and how superior
everything else is, when this paragraph grabbed my attention:
The reason must be that no one in Microsoft actually gives a damn. Each group develops their own UI widgets in their own style and they simply
don’t care that it’s a total mess. They don’t care
that I have to learn new ways of doing the same task just because they
couldn’t be bothered to do things the same way as other applications.
I’m not saying, for example, that they shouldn’t have introduced the
ribbon concept in Office 2007, because it seems to work pretty well, and I can
believe that it really is a better UI model. But they should have taken stock of
what they were doing and made it a system-wide UI device. New widgets and UI
models do crop up from time to time, but they should be rare, and when they do
appear, Microsoft should make them general so that everyone can use them.
The article/post contained a lot of conjecture and fact-less
information up to that point, and had strayed into the Vista-bashing camp that so
many love when that paragraph smacked me. It’s where I went from having very
little respect for the author to near zero. I mean seriously — how could you
honestly write that no one cares at Microsoft? Not a single person?
Right. There are some misguided teams and products at Microsoft
from time to time (and some great products that are canceled), and maybe some
products that he or I don’t agree with, but come on — there’s
plenty of people who want to produce a product that others will use and enjoy (or at
least find useful)! Does the author of that article honestly think, Microsoft
employees get up in the morning, and think to themselves, I couldn’t care less
about my future or any of my customers — I’ll go do the least amount of
work I can to get my job done — and produce something barely adequate.
I frequently see someone posting, “I’m joining Microsoft … so that
I can not make a difference and not care!”
A few other zingers from the post…
If you develop software for a living, and were to say something to me in an
interview like this:
Another example; Win32 has a function for getting the size of a file. File sizes
on Windows are limited to 2^64 bytes, and so they need a 64-bit integer to be
expressed easily. But the API call to get the size of a file doesn’t give
you a 64-bit value. Instead, it gives you a pair of 32-bit values that have to
be combined in a particular way. For 32-bit Windows, that’s sort of
understandable; 32-bit Windows is, well, 32-bit, so you might not expect to be
able to use 64-bit integers. But if you use the same API in 64-bit Windows, it
still gives you the pair of numbers, rather than just a nice simple 64-bit
number. While this made some kind of sense on 32-bit Windows, it makes no sense
at all on 64-bit Windows, since 64-bit Windows can, by definition, use 64-bit
numbers.
It shows such an immaturity of what it takes to do long term programming (not just
one-off programming for hobbies) and API maintenance that you’d be a
“no-hire.” Dude, do you seriously want to conditionalize all of your
code just so you can recompile on 64 bit Windows? Do you want a new API just for
that? Seriously, what’s the gain?
So clearly, …
So Windows is just a disaster to write programs for. It’s miserable.
It’s quite nice if you want to use the same techniques you learned 15
years ago and not bother to change how you do, well, anything, but for anyone
else it’s all pain. I thought before that Microsoft cared about people
like me. But it doesn’t. And it makes programming on Windows painful.
Microsoft is great at backwards compatibility—you can take really old programs
and compile and run them on a brand new Windows—but terrible at design and
terrible at providing a good experience.
He applauds OSX at some point — coming to the conclusion that the Mac OSX APIs
are genius … never mind the fact that Apple had to start over from scratch and
every application needed to be rewritten (and the fact that the whole thing was
inspired by the NeXT OpenStep). Maybe they are wonderful — I’ve only
dabbled (but seriously, Objective C??!?). Microsoft could have done that too —
but when you have the market share Microsoft has — can you truly afford to do
that? No way. Hundreds of millions of people every day use legacy
software on modern Windows operating systems because Microsoft made the difficult
choice to keep supporting them.
As the author goes on to say, it causes the internals of Windows to be less than
completely desirable as it is forced to maintain a level of compatibility with old
APIs and peculiarities of older versions of Windows. Are there people working at
Microsoft right now who would love to just start fresh with a clean slate?
Abso-freakin-lutely. But, business needs often come first in the
world of making money. Microsoft was able to keep existing products running because
of the design of their OS and APIs made it possible. Apple couldn’t with OS 9
and earlier when upgrading. When they can completely virtualize a Win32 process
seamlessly — then they can start fresh.
Taken alone, these are all fairly minor things. Put together, the interface is
just completely shambolic. It looks amateurish. The quirks of each new interface
have to be learned anew. This slap-dash approach to look-and-feel gives the
impression of a platform that no one really cares about.
The author seems to believe that everyone at Microsoft should just work together and
produce products at the same time on the same ship schedules — as every one
should contribute the “whole” and produce things that are only good for
the masses. They aren’t allowed to innovate on their own or produce something
unique or better than another team. “Just stick the widget into the OS …
we’ll ship when you’re ready … and we’ll happily adapt to
any changes that any other team needs to make.”
If the author had chosen to research and provide facts, better understand the
development environments, platform capabilities, and stick to a point, it might have
been a mildly interesting read — but alas, he did not. It got my blood boiling
…, hence my post. Maybe Microsoft, who couldn’t care less according the
author, will nonetheless contact him to get feedback on how to build the perfect
API. Clearly it can’t ever have a backwards-compatibility layer or object
model … so it just has to be perfect right out the door. :-P
What is the perfect API? For rich or a reach application? Give it a little thought
right now. What comes to your mind right away?
