Could you explain who you’re speaking of and what you mean?
Pretty sure he’s referring to MS
Their old operating motto seemed to be “embrace, extend, extinguish”
Embrace a “standard” - whatever one it happened to be
Extend it in some meaningful way that was MS only
And then, by simply being as big as they were they would then kill any competition
(ie/ Netscape)
For which they were subjected to a consent decree
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
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The “MS stuff” wasn’t a give-away? 
Microsoft of course … after all that was what Norman talked about.
Gotcha. I didn’t know your reply was to Norm.
If a post has a reply then you see an icon in the upper right
it is harder to tell IF a reply IS a post and what its replying to from what I can see
Sometimes it shows who you’re replying to, sometimes not.
I try to follow typical forum etiquette and quote the person I’m answering, but I don’t always get that right either! (Like here - it’s difficult to use the quote function on an iPhone)
I think it’s mostly about the controls - almost everything else I develop on Mac works fine under Windows (with the exception of serial ports), but the UI usually looks bad and performs badly. PiDog’s DataView listbox is wonderful on Mac and unusable under Windows. Windows performance also seems much more hardware-dependent than Mac, which I suppose makes sense because there are so many hardware variations between Win boxes. Xojo just doesn’t seem to care about Win very much, even though cross-platform write-once is its biggest selling point. Just look at the flicker saga - it went on for at least a decade until Julian(I think) figured it out for them.
I too, was starting to look for an alternative when API 2 was introduced, and had decided not to renew, but once they’d backed off on the event renaming, I gave it a try with 2019r3.1 and was able to convert one of my medium-sized apps in about an hour, which would have been shorter if I was a regex whiz. I dislike some of the changes, but I generally hate change anyway and will get over it. I like the general direction they’re moving toward - unifying everything and getting rid of the “Xojo.Core” stuff which I never really understood. Anyway I’m back on board and still loving the readabilty of the code (I’d much rather type “If… Then… End” than use curly braces), the lack of cryptic operators, curly braces, and whitespace sensitivity, and the IDE’s compartmentalization of methods.
My biggest issues are with the IDE itself - I think Xojo was a huge step back from RealStudio. The latter was lovingly crafted by people who valued productivity and UX, whereas Xojo seems to have been put together hastily with the prime objective of making it look cool and modern. Many things were broken in that transition and remain unfixed to this day, e.g. Help Text and the insane behavior of the Navigator. I constantly ask myself how the devs can use the thing every day and not notice this stuff, but I recently had a conversation with Geoff about it and he assured me that he is well aware of the issues, they do bother him, and they will eventually be addressed once his Master Plan has been more realized. This simple acknowledgement was very reassuring to me, because all my comments to that time had fallen on deaf ears.
Welcome !
Just look at the flicker saga - it went on for at least a decade until Julian(I think) figured it out for them.
That was, in part, an unwillingness to implement their own pseudo transparency which they finally did
Win32 just doesnt support transparency in any thing close to what macOS does
I know they said that repeatedly
Multiple different UI toolkits doesnt help MS or Xojo at all but MS never seem to abandon or deprecate anything. So it was hard to know what their guidance on “use this going forward” was.
Who knows what will now happen with the merging of Win32 and their universal runtime
Xojo.XXXX and all the others under Xojo were an attempt to stop clobbering users code every time Xojo added something new. It did do that but it also didnt move forward fast enough and so it failed 
You have no idea how long and loud greg and I complained about some of the decisions but …
FWIW I know “a version” of that master plan but am not allowed to repeat it
I strongly suspect “deja vu” will be a word used a lot
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There was also certainly lot of negative feedback from us about the Xojo IDE during the beta period before it was introduced…
My feeling has been the company went off the tracks when it started working on the RS to Xojo transition… That is when it felt to me that the company was making lot of bad decisions about the direction of the product overall… Yes there were missteps before that, but there also felt like there was a lot of good forward momentum… for me that transition was when I started to feel the missteps were getting bigger without significant compensating forward motion…
That said, after with 19 years using the product exclusively fro coding and getting to know it well, it is hard to find the time to learn a new environment/language for the types of things I use Xojo for, never mind being X-Platform.
At one time I coded and scripted in other languages, but that as over 20 years ago.
-Karen
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Some transitions were definitely easier to deal with
The move to Xojo was, IMHO, the hardest to make because a lot of things had to be rethought out because the UI changed so radically
Hindsight being 20/20 more code should have been refactored earlier than it was
There was a sense of urgency to ship as well and those two rarely come together in way that excellence is the result
EDIT : there are aspects that I would redo in a heart beat
I also (as you know) don’t get why there’s such a lack of drag/drop GUI designers in the X-Plat world.
But… If you watch the (albeit scarce) videos on Maui, (all done on by MS devs, on Macs, targeting iOS, interestingly) one of the VERY interesting developments is when writing in C#, using the MVU model, you can change the code WHILE THE APP IS RUNNING and the app reflects the changes right away. They show changing button sizes, text, and a few other things LIVE, and you see the changes immediately. (Mind blown)
I don’t think I’ve ever seen any IDE (with a compiled language) that can do that.
The cost, though, seems to be that there’s no drag/drop GUI designer. I REALLY hope (If I were a religious type I’d pray) that someone creates a Drag/Drop GUI designer that writes the underlying code. Live or not, as long as I can at least START with a designer…
Unfortunately, for reasons I really don’t understand, nobody seems to be creating drag/drop GUI designers. Everyone seems to be ok with writing code-based UIs. I guess maybe it comes from the school of programmers who had to write HTML by hand? Dunno…
Cant C# work in either a fully compiled stand alone exe mode OR as a compile on the fly JIT based language as well ?
I have this nagging feeling it can and thats how they could make that work
Professional snobbery ?
“Oh drag and drop is for ‘beginners’ and people that just dont know how to code it by hand” or some assinine sentiment
There used to be a LOT of professional snobbery around VB as well
Will say I know companies that made a LOT of money using VB and that got bought up by bigger ones in part because of their expertise in systems integration - most of which was done in VB
reminds me of the Oracle world where if you didn’t use SQLPlus, you weren’t living life. With that said, I look at my kids and their friends where the natural instinct is to use their finger instead of a mouse and keyboard. I am sure the next wave of criticism we will have is about just that 
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Keyboard ? Whats a keyboard ?
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I was taking about more than the IDE when I said that was about the time they went off the tracks… I meant overall in terms of management priorities, directions and what they chose to work on.
It was less obvious as an issue before that, at least to me… I don’t know if it coincided with a change in Geoff’s thinking, changes in staff or combination of both. All I know is that how things have gone since have considerably damped my enthusiasm for the product.
-Karen
And this is where I have to bite my tongue 
The why and how things got this way are not what really matters… what should matter/concern Xojo Inc is the loss of enthusiasm … and I suspect I am not alone in feeling that.
-Karen
Very true - how it got here matters less.
Why it got here is one I cannot explain since I couldn’t read Geoffs mind then and still cannot.
But I can say, for certain, you’re not alone
I have heard from people I literally NEVER heard from about this feeling as well
What is the problem you see?