When was the last time Microsoft had a unified vision that was focused on building an amazing line of products that integrated well with each other?
I can only think of short snippets in history where they moved in that direction for maybe a year or two & then went scatterbrain.
Microsoft has benefited from a monopoly in the enterprise and has never been forced to innovate from a product perspective. See Slack/Teams as a case study of how they have operated when even slightly pushed.
* Edit - .NET, C#, TypeScript teams are an exception to the above. Highly underrated. Amazing talent there. Not sure who all gets credit. Anders & Mads for sure though.
I'd say the late '80s - early '90s when Microsoft was building the early versions of Microsoft Office. Integration among productivity apps was one of the key points of competition among all of the office suites of that era.
There were other huge coordinated efforts like the TwC initiative and the Windows 10 refactoring but those were invisible to end users.
You are right if talking about the efforts improving C# and CLR, taking the lessons out of Midori, Blazor and Aspire.
Regarding F#, VB, and C++/CLI, the poor souls are on a lifeline that makes CLR nowadays stand out for C# Language Runtime, instead of the original Common.
And the chaos that reigns on Windows Forms, WPF, WinUI, MAUI certainly isn't helping.
Finally they are constrained in what they can put into C# DevKit as means to not canibalize Visual Studio and Windows sales, it can only be good enough, not great and feature parity.
Also regardless of the reasoning behind it, having TypeScript rewriten into C# instead of Go would have been a great opportunity to make C# more relevant outside Microsoft shops, instead anyone looking to contribute to TypeScript compiler will be learning Go instead.
I can only think of short snippets in history where they moved in that direction for maybe a year or two & then went scatterbrain.
Microsoft has benefited from a monopoly in the enterprise and has never been forced to innovate from a product perspective. See Slack/Teams as a case study of how they have operated when even slightly pushed.
* Edit - .NET, C#, TypeScript teams are an exception to the above. Highly underrated. Amazing talent there. Not sure who all gets credit. Anders & Mads for sure though.