That's a rather sweeping statement. I would agree MFC is a maintance nightmare, care to expand on the others though?
I wasn't applying those terms simply to the windows technologies, I was saying that in general they all have their own strengths and weaknesses ^^.
But from the windows perspective, compatibility is certainly an issue. Anyone who develops for linux can tell you, that we don't actually develop for linux, we develop an independant framework, and then produce nightly builds for multiple platforms, thereby rolling out applications for any and all systems without major changes, as opposed to windows applications only working for windows. Its a subtle change but it can have huge effect.
An example might be FileZilla, only recently they have rolled out version 3, that had to be redesigned from the ground up, but is now rolled out across all platforms, whereas before it was a nice windows-only application. Unless you are talking home or office use only, cross-platform is a serious consideration of course depending entirely on the type of application.
It seems entirely naive these days to say "my application only runs on windows", and then when Microsoft decides to change its' operating system (without external consent, I might add) you find your application does not work or requires a "compatibility layer" (as Apple have had to roll out to keep its' ancient applications still running). These are the scalability issues that should be considered. One operating system lasts... 5 years? 10 years? Before major hardware/software changes and then your executable is out of the window except under emulation, and that is really dire and unprofessional. It was acceptable in the past when people didn't care, but people *do* care now.
EDIT : You might consider these comments when you realise in 5 years that none of your PC games from yesteryear run on the latest version of windows and require heavy emulation, or that the non-standard database that you created needs a transfer tool or you have to maintain an ancient server somewhere that is fragile. There is such a thing as BitRot and you should guard against it.
Why would you invest a lot of time and effort into something that is going to not work in 5 years time?
