By Abhijith M B
Publication Date: 2026-05-07 04:08:00
When you right-click a file in Windows 11 or launch a traditional desktop application, you are interacting with code that predates the commercial internet. The Win32 API, introduced all the way back in the Windows 95 era, is still a significant part of the world’s most popular desktop operating system. But according to Microsoft’s own leadership, this was never the plan.
First spotted by Windows Latest, in a recent video posted by the official Microsoft Dev Docs account on X, Mark Russinovich, Microsoft’s Chief Technology Officer of Azure and the legendary creator of Sysinternals, admitted that the survival of Win32 is one of the biggest surprises in the company’s history.
“Did anyone in the 90s expect Win32 to be a first-class API surface in the year 2026? And I think I can safely answer, no,” Russinovich explained. “Nobody, I think, would have expected that because we were thinking flying cars and, you know, moon stations by the year 2026,…
