What I've been seeing in the .NET world, is that from conception until about 3 years ago, the *entire* .NET ecosystem was driven by Microsoft's perception of what "enterprises" needed. That meant big, clunky systems, all designed to scale out and expand across the universe, but no way of doing "get in and get out" work.

In the last few years, along with the shift to open source, they've been making stuff more lightweight, and easier to get up and running without reading through 800 pages of manuals and such. Web API vs. WCF is a good example. Even though Web API basically means abandoning the investment in WCF, it only takes a few minutes to learn enough Web API to get up and running while WCF takes a while to really get bootstrapped. So yeah, you are throwing out a big investment (or calling it "legacy" and putting it into maintenance) but the replacement is a LOT easier to learn than what it's replacing.

I didn't really mean to call it "innovation" in the sense that it's actually innovative, but I meant it in the sense that Microsoft sees what they are doing as innovation. I see it as, "looking at what everyone else is doing, trying to shoehorn it into the .NET ecosystem, and then kind of supporting it for a few years"...

J.Ja