[SyneRyder]

> As someone who's written Windows software since the 90s, I can't shake the feeling that Microsoft just churns out completely new development stacks every few years.

That's the theme behind one of Joel Spolsky's old essays, Fire And Motion:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

"Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features. Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don’t have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP. The companies who stumble are the ones who spend too much time reading tea leaves to figure out the future direction of Microsoft."