I wonder who found this out the hard way....

I'd hope it's a precaution by the SPaR team over at Companies House.

This. You are now the Wizard of Oz.

The reason for this, of course, is that the C-suite is trying to get rid of you, and a subset of engineers, as soon as it becomes reasonable.

Not yet accurate nor flexible enough to replace properly-trained humans at point-of-order, or drive-thru order kiosks.

Agreed - without user-space, developer and deployment tools, there's not much for the kernel to do. 3% on the kernel might even seem overly high.

Do you submit drivers for WHQL certification?

What type of hardware is it?

My specific driver is an open source file system driver (WinFsp). This is a software only driver that requires attestation signing. There was a period a few years ago when Microsoft required WHQL testing for Windows Server (which I did), but they seem to have dropped this requirement.

The linked OSR thread has a lot of other driver developers including a lot of them maintaining drivers for hardware devices.

With Microsoft removing our access to the hardware section of the partner center, we are not able to submit drivers for either attestation or WHQL testing.

React Native, absolutely - as with Office 365, using WinUI 3 as the underlying UI layer.

Running a full javascript framework in a javascript runtime.

When did office start using React Native? Office has been around well before the creation of javascript, let alone react.

I'm not sure that it uses React Native, but modern add-ins for Office are JS, so any injected modern add-in will be using JS rather than COM/C/C++. This gave add-ins portability between all supported Office platforms, increased security, and made administration much easier.

Go for it, then, and good luck!

You'll understand if I don't think the tradeoffs were necessary, or worthwhile.

Ambition does really weird things to people.

But I'm sure in this case when they achieve some kind of dominant position and Microsoft offers to re-absorb them they will do the honorable thing.

When has that ever happened in the entire human history?

People do the honorable thing all the time.

These people don't, but people you've never heard of are always doing honorable things.

Might be some sort of connection there.

That's a stretch.