Why Microsoft has made developers horrified about coding for Windows 8
This is a bit of a horror story for Windows platform coders. Nothing unusual really is you know the territory.
It reminds me a bit of MSN. Now today you probably think of MSN as a kind of magazine web portal with salacious stories about celebs. That is not how it started.
Back in the days before the WWW (shall we say www.bc?), Microsoft became very envious of Compuserve's dominant position as the world's leading bulletin board service. Bulletin boards for those of you too young to remember, were proprietary systems that you could dial up over the telephone with a thingy called a modem. Anyway, not to be left behind, Microsoft created it's own competing dial-up service, called it MSN and tried to flog it for a hefty monthly subscription.
It was actually quite an impressive system as most of it was done with vector animation in an early forerunner of Flash. However the timing couldn't have been worse. Microsoft were still hard selling it as long ago as 1997 when the charge to the web was well under way, but the original version didn't even include access to the web.
So what became of all the developers who built the original MSN with that nifty animation software - presumably they retooled just as all the windows platform guys are going to have to do now.
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