That's not a bad summary for AI, but it is very funny that every step of the way gets the adjective "modern".
My own personal outsider take on this is that there are really only three eras that need to be considered:
- "HWND era": win16/win32 classic UI aka "WinForms". This extends all the way up to ActiveX. Microsoft get to dictate the platform without real competition.
- XAML era: the second system. Classic WinForms doesn't handle high-DPI displays or GPU rendering; it relies on pixel positioning and lets you draw directly on the framebuffer. WPF is the reaction to this.
- Phone era: suddenly there is real competition and users start using a lot of non-Microsoft platforms. Microsoft launch their own phone, complete with new sandboxed APIs that don't correspond to Win32 at all. This is ultimately a market failure. But Microsoft have invested too much in UWP.
At this point, the winning stacks globally are, in order: web (including Electron), iOS, Android. Nobody wants to do native Windows applications that aren't games if they can possibly help it. Even Microsoft start building web-on-desktop apps like Teams.
So the only thing Microsoft can do is salvage operations on UWP APIs and XAML-related techs to try to make it usable to desktop developers by getting out of the sandbox.
