Community reactions to my Windows 8 announcement rant

Close to 40,000 views. Hundreds of tweets, retweets, replies and likes. Close to 150 upvotes and 88 comments on Hacker News. 175 points and 127 comments on Reddit. I clearly didn’t expect that when I posted “How one announcement destroyed the .NET ecosystem on Windows” 24 hours ago.

All I wanted to do was expand on a Twitter thread and I'm glad that I did. Lots of interesting thoughts, memories and insights came out of that and I decided to collect some of the tweets in this post. There’s way more both on Twitter, as well as comments on Hacker News and Reddit. But first…

What my post wasn’t about

The vast majority of reactions where interesting and on point. However, some went into other directions that are probably as important, but were distracting from the main point — miscommunication and ignoring the [apparently dumb] community.

There were people attacking Microsoft for even trying to go HTML/JS route in Windows 8. While I’m not a fan of that direction, I totally understand that it’s important to try different things and even if they end up not being successful it was what it was — a cohesive strategy that didn’t work out.

Other people reminded me of the Silverlight “fiasco” that preceded Windows 8. While I don’t remember the communication details of that, the end of Silverlight was mainly a result of external factors (aka Apple/Steve Jobs). So it’s a little unfair to blame Microsoft for what happened there.

Miguel de Icaza pointed out the unwarranted differences in WinRT APIs from the .NET equivalents. That is a fair criticism, but one could argue that change was required even if painful. (Whether or not that is true is another story).

There were also a lot of comments from current and former Microsofties on the internal politics that were the root of many issues outlined above. And this whole discussion, ironically, started with a tweet denying that.

What I wanted to stress was the inaction in the face of controversy. Not the action that turned out to be unsuccessful. My thesis was that, even if you make an unfortunate announcement that is misinterpreted (as you think) by the community, it is your job to come back to that community and explain what you actually meant or why you have to do the thing that got them up in arms until they understand.

Community reactions

Here are some select reactions from the people who responded on Twitter.

But I failed

My only goal (well, besides getting those 40k page views ;) was to document how the community felt back then with a hope to prevent or minimize similar mishaps in the future. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like I’ve succeeded. At least with the main protagonist of the story.