> It's very amusing to see Sinofsky of all people all but dumping on .NET and (still?!) not understanding why developers so proactively jumped ship from Win32 & MFC hell to WinForms. Or why the HTML/JS app model in Win8 never really took off.

At the risk of getting my Microsoft history wrong, I'm fairly sure that Steven Sinofsky wasn't working on Windows or even MFC (i.e. what he did as one of you guys) in .NET's early days of 1999-2003. He was leading Office at that time. Office of that era was transitioning from the Windows XP look that still persists in Windows Forms to the early Ribbon, and was then (as now?) using very custom GUI code that didn't correspond to any specific higher-level Windows app framework.

Mac OS Office apps had just separated their codebase again from Windows apps after being unified in the mid-90s to get to feature parity (which annoyed Mac users who felt they now had non-native-feeling apps that were slow and bloated), and the "Office framework" was still quite distinct from any single-platform Windows app as a result of that.

So if Sinofsky did not understand why people went from USER/GDI to WinForms, that may just have been the fact that nobody working for him had felt the need to make that transition.