Last week at BUILD Microsoft announced many great things, but one of them overshadowed all the other ones (no, I’m not talking about HoloLens) and not necessarily in a good way. What I’m referring to are so called “Bridges” — tools enabling “native” Windows apps not built on Universal Windows Platform.

The first one of the bridges was the one we’ve already heard about at MWC. It allows running web sites as if they were native Windows apps (including publishing them through the store). It probably makes more sense than the WinJS story we’ve heard before and everyone is ok-to-happy with this one.

The second bridge allows .NET and Win32 app access to the WinRT APIs. This wasn’t announced before (as far as I remember), but is a pretty obvious one. Now that we have windowed WinRT apps and Windows RT is gone, there’s no reason not to enable this scenario.

This brings us to the 3rd and 4th bridge — running Android apps and Objective-C apps on Windows. We’ve heard rumors about Android for quite some time now, but the Objective-C story was a surprise to pretty much everyone. Some people (mostly those who don’t care) cheered this development, most of those who care (aka my Windows developer friends) concluded that the sky is falling.

I’m pretty sure that Windows team thought long and deep enough before greenlighting public outing of these bridges. I’m confident that they have better understanding of the whole picture than I do, and I won’t question the fact itself.

What I question, though, and am pretty upset about, is the way this information was delivered. From the way it was presented to the general public, it sounded like there’s no actual reason to develop “native” (UWP) Windows apps anymore. Like you can develop an Android or iOS app and then easily deploy/port it to Windows.

To those who can imagine how all of this is done it is clear that:

only a subset (probably a really small one) of such apps will be portable it won’t work as smoothly as a UWP app

Later in the week I participated in a roundtable with one of the top executives in the Windows team. Even though I confirmed that nothing that was discussed at that meeting is secret, I won’t name names here, just in case. This executive confirmed to us that:

yes, Android/iOS bridges are just crutches to get developers “over the hump” to Windows and then they will see the need and value in rewriting their apps “properly” long term vision is to allow portability of “business logic” libraries from Java/C++/Objective-C and building native UIs on top of that. Not making Android/iOS apps native citizens on Windows (well, because it won’t work)

This is a more reasonable message and the one that should’ve been communicated from stage. Failing to communicate that will most likely result in:

10x harder (if not impossible) process for contractors of selling Windows app development to their customers. A large community of most loyal Microsoft developers may just go out of business Decision makers who were on the verge of greenlighting Windows app development may decide to scrape these plans with a vision of porting their Android/iOS apps in the future. Once they see that porting is actually not as easy as it may seem (maybe even impossible for their scenarios) it may be too late, because there’s no budget for a proper Windows app anymore Android/iOS developers who decide to cross over to Windows using these bridges will most likely hit the hump instead of going over it. I’m pretty sure that in the foreseeable future these ports will result in user experiences comparable to those of PhoneGap apps at best (I would speculate that it would definitely be worse at least at first). This in turn will result in user dissatisfaction and consecutively poor results for the developer. They will most likely abandon the platform than decide to rewrite the app as UWP. The real “app gap” apps (Snapchats of the world) will never use these bridges — they will either come as real native apps or not come at all. Yes, we were shown an example in the form of Candy Crush Saga, but let’s be honest it’s not a technologically exceptional game and it’s value lies in a different dimension. Additionally it’s a game — meaning its UI is non-native by definition. And as for games in general, there’s a strong developer movement towards middleware solutions, so I’m not sure how many game developers could benefit from these technologies.

You may say that I’m making it sound worse than it really is, and we won’t know the results of the poor messaging at BUILD for some time now. But if you don’t believe me that a messaging flop like this could be really harmful to the most loyal community, and the whole platform as a result, let me illustrate it with real events from the past.

A lesson from the past (not learned)

In May or June 2011 (I’m too lazy to lookup the actual date) Steven Sinofsky announced Windows 8 and briefly talked about the developer story. Things like “making native Windows apps with HTML and Javascript” were said, but there was no mention of C# or XAML. It was communicated in back channels that C# developers shouldn’t worry and there will be a C#/XAML story, but decision makers are mostly not involved in “back channels”. They haven’t heard “C#/XAML” from stage and decided to wait and see what will happen next.

At the time of this announcement my primary occupation was development of the WPF/Silverlight part of amCharts. We weren’t selling tons of licenses for the .NET part of the product (up to 10 a month), but at prices from $250 to $2000 it paid my bills.

In 3 months since this announcement until the first BUILD, where the XAML/C# story was unveiled, our sales for the WPF/Silverlight controls dropped to basically 0 (we’ve sold just 1 or 2 licenses). Luckily for me I was transitioning to working on AdDuplex full time at that moment and this by coincidence was a lucky push for me to switch more quickly. WPF/Silverlight version of amCharts went out-of-business (was discontinued).

I’ve discussed this issue with CEO of one of the largest .NET control vendors, and, even though their volumes were much greater than ours and sales didn’t drop to zero, they’ve still seen a tremendous decline in sales.

If you try to draw a line when most of the .NET control vendors started to diversify into other areas and technologies, I wouldn’t be surprised that you will arrive at approximately that period. A lot of most loyal Microsoft partners found out that their businesses can be destroyed by one unsaid phrase unless they diversify their offerings and deemphasize Windows developer tools in their product portfolios.

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To sum it all up, I get a feeling that not many at the helm of Microsoft realize that the message sent from stage at BUILD 2015 is more than just words aimed at media. It could very well be a question of life and death for many consulting businesses and result in the most loyal Microsoft developers moving on to other fields. It is important to understand that it’s not enough to just explain deeper meaning of what was said to these developers. It’s the stake holders/decision makers who need to get the memo, and for now I feel that they’ve got the wrong one.