Often not making many APIs available in their latest programming technologies like .NET/C# (at least initially.)
WPF, Silverlight, the "Metro" experiment that lasted for a single (!) version of Windows (8), and great discontinued apps like PhotoDraw, are some of the other cases that personally affected me.
For that matter even winforms is still available.
The Metro UI evolved into windows 10 UWP, and practically everything that was in Metro UI can be transferred to UWP, down to the homescreen widgets.
Silverlight and DirectInput are still available, though they are deprecated they haven't been removed. Silverlight even had security updates released as late as a year ago [2]even though it has been deprecated since 2015
[1] - https://github.com/Microsoft/dotnet-framework-early-access/b...
[2] - https://www.microsoft.com/getsilverlight/locale/en-us/html/M...
They changed the name to Modern UI, some reported [1] because it clashed with their German partner Metro AG. In any case Modern UI started with Zune and you could get for the time nifty looking media player for it on XP [2]. You can still see it in newer parts of Windows 10 with its aversion to skeuomorphic design, preferring text and minimalist 1 color icons.
[1](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/08/micro...) [2] https://archive.ledfrog.com/2011/06/microsoft-zune-software-...
Is that dichotomy still present in Windows 10?
See, it's a confusing exercise to even figure out what their sub-platforms are supposed to be called. Apparently they are now "Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps (formerly Windows Store apps and Metro-style apps)" [0]
Do they have access to the full feature set of DirectX etc.? Do they have support for multiple appearances, Dark Mode, etc.?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Windows_Platform_app...
It was barely dogfooded at all by Microsoft themselves and the future we got instead was the bland, inferior “Metro” experience.
Support for the Win16 API has been abysmal recently. My limited experience of old DOS and Windows applications is that they often run better under dosbox or wine than native.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Speech_API
While Apple's speech APIs, for all their huff and puff and other legitimate work on accessibility, are totally lacking, way behind, locked away from third party developers, and sadly deficient for application developers who need more than the most basic off-the-shelf features.
For example, SAPI has for decades been able to a send mouth positions (visemes) synchronized with the speech, to animate the lips of the Wizard or Rover the Dog or Clippy (or whatever a paperclip uses to articulate), which is proven to improve speech understanding. But not a peep from Apple's speech API -- their lips are sealed.
https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1609/Converting-Text-To...
Actually abandoning APIs is very much one of them.
While programs written in older API still work, MS is notorious for abandoning APIs (as opposed to removing them) and asking developers to support its new shiny thing even faster than Apple changes frameworks (heck, you could still compile NeXT apps 30+ years later, and the frameworks where still supported, albeit with some alterations).
MS always invents new frameworks and APIs every 2-3 years for the same thing, e.g. GUI programming (or at least used to, haven't followed for the last several years).
