> Breaking backwards compatibility is a very high price to pay, as many of its proponents end up discovering the hard way.
I don't believe breaking back-compat was ever the problem: there were (and are) two main problems with UWP (and its predecessors[1]) going back to Windows 8:
* UWP were/are unnecessarily and very artificially restricted in what they could do: not just the sandboxing, but the app-store restrictions almost copied directly from Apple's own store.
* And because the then-new XAML-based "Jupiter" UI for UWP did not (and still doesn't, imo) ship with control library suitable for high-information-density, mouse-first UIs - and because XAML is still fundamentally unchanged since its original 2005 design with WPF in .NET Framework 3.5 - the XAML system is now far less capable (overall) than HTML+CSS in Electron now (the horror). Microsoft had a choice to maintain progress on XAML or let Electron overrun it for desktop application UIs - instead they've decided to keep XAML alive but for what gain? There simply isn't any decent exit-strategy for Microsoft now: they've just re-committed themselves to a dead-end UI system that needs significant amounts of re-work just to keep it competitive with Electron, while simultaneously using Electron for new headline first-party applications like Teams, Skype, Visual Studio Code, and more.
Microsoft has completely wasted the past ~10 years of progress they could have made on Windows and the desktop user-experience, letting Apple stay competitive with macOS while still funneling billions into iOS and iPad OS - further weakening the Windows value-proposition).
[1] Metro Apps, Modern Apps, Microsoft Store Apps, Windows Store Apps...
Skype uses React Native, and given that React Native for Windows bashes Electron in every talk that they give with its 300x overheard bar charts, expect that when React Native for macOS and Linux get mature enough, which MS is also contributing for, that eventually all Electron in use gets replaced with React Native.
I don't believe breaking back-compat was ever the problem: there were (and are) two main problems with UWP (and its predecessors[1]) going back to Windows 8:
* UWP were/are unnecessarily and very artificially restricted in what they could do: not just the sandboxing, but the app-store restrictions almost copied directly from Apple's own store.
* And because the then-new XAML-based "Jupiter" UI for UWP did not (and still doesn't, imo) ship with control library suitable for high-information-density, mouse-first UIs - and because XAML is still fundamentally unchanged since its original 2005 design with WPF in .NET Framework 3.5 - the XAML system is now far less capable (overall) than HTML+CSS in Electron now (the horror). Microsoft had a choice to maintain progress on XAML or let Electron overrun it for desktop application UIs - instead they've decided to keep XAML alive but for what gain? There simply isn't any decent exit-strategy for Microsoft now: they've just re-committed themselves to a dead-end UI system that needs significant amounts of re-work just to keep it competitive with Electron, while simultaneously using Electron for new headline first-party applications like Teams, Skype, Visual Studio Code, and more.
Microsoft has completely wasted the past ~10 years of progress they could have made on Windows and the desktop user-experience, letting Apple stay competitive with macOS while still funneling billions into iOS and iPad OS - further weakening the Windows value-proposition).
[1] Metro Apps, Modern Apps, Microsoft Store Apps, Windows Store Apps...