Comment by pjmlp

I agree with your point of view, this was the second coming of Longhorn, WinRT was after all pushed by the same folks that killed the Longhorn effort, those on Windows team that sided with Steven Sinofsky, using COM in Vista as future foundation for .NET ideas in Longhorn.

The Hilo tutorial for Windows 7 remarks regarding C++ are quite telling of their point of view, on which programming language one should be using,

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/announcing-hilo/

"The rich user experience of Windows 7 is best accessed through a powerful, flexible language, and that means C++: by using C++ you can access the raw power of the APIs for Windows 7."

From https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/msdn10/f...

Joe Duffy has some remarks on how even with Midori running Asia Bing infrastructure, and proving workloads in front of the Windows team, the reception to it was rather cold.

https://youtu.be/CuD7SCqHB7k?t=921&si=r8a0nScB4fcrxxIu

Eventually he left MSR and created Pulumin on top of Go.

Meanwhile Apple/NeXT and Google, decided to push languages like Objective-C, Swift, Java, Kotlin, over classical C and C++, proving the point that change is possible if management is willing to support the team, even if that is a very long run.

See Apple's Metal Swift bindings, versus Microsoft's Agility SDK for DirectX.