The fact that they had a long time to transition doesn't negate the fact that they have to spend the time doing the transition.

At market-rate developer salary, it doesn't take a lot of man months for the port not to be worth the investment for small shops.

Actually, considering the long-term average growth of “developer market-rate salaries” it makes sense to transition as early as possible (as soon as the new alternative is announced/becomes available) to minimise overall cost and capture the market share of those who shan’t transition when deprecation is announced and cost of developers is too high to make it worthwhile.

Except if the new thing flops and the old thing doesn’t die - which is much more common in the Windows world. MFC is mostly dead. So are ATL and WPF. Win32 is still going strong though.

It's a bit judgmental, though the original complaint is also a bit whiny.

The reality is that Turtle couldn't make the business case to port to Cocoa at any point for 18 years, probably because most of their customers were Windows.

That's not them being lazy, that's just them directing their resources according to market demand and engineering constraints.

And Apple is not being greedy or uncaring, they also have to direct resources according to market demand and engineering constraints.

If Turtle had more Mac customers, they'd have either ported their app, or they'd purchase a Carbon compatibility library. And if more developers were actively using Carbon, Apple would put more resources into it.

They aren't, and so the two are going to part ways.

> But that's part of what lost them their lead after the '90s

I think that guy lives in a bubble, Microsoft is still by a huge margin the lead in desktop OS market share :-P.

And really the main reason is that they try their hardest to not break people's applications. If Windows suddenly couldn't run the applications people wanted, everyone would migrate to Linux (and some to Mac, but Linux is free so the majority would go for the free stuff).

I've seen quite a few legacy Windows app needing to be run as administrator, compatibility mode, or both. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. It's glaringly irresponsible that applications should be given read/write access to the C:\Windows folder because that was acceptable in the 90s.

Now when I get an exe that needs to run in compatibility mode I don't even bother with it. I'm not compromising my computer because a developer has abandoned their software.

Good for you, but other people want their computers to do work for them with the applications they want to use.

Jens is way oversimplifying the developer story around Carbon, FWIW. It existed because Adobe and Microsoft wouldn’t port their apps without it, and that wasn’t going to change in the foreseeable future. It wasn’t deprecated in the technical sense until 2007.

Yeah, the arc was that Cocoa was the future, but as late as 2007, Carbon was still widely considered a viable target for new apps.

By the way, it wasn't just Adobe and Microsoft; practically no developers wanted to write all of their UI code twice.