Blame Java - their use of utf-16 is the sole reason that Microsoft chose it.
Sun sued Microsoft in 1996 for making nonportable extensions to Java (a license violation). Microsoft lost, and created C# in 2000.
At the time, “Starting Java”
was the most feared message on the internet. People really thought that in-browser Java would take over over the world (yes Java, not Javascript)
Sun chose UTF16 in 1995 believing that Unicode would never need more than 64k characters. In 1996 that changed. UTF16 got variable length encoding and became a white elephant
So Microsoft chose UTF16 know full well that it had
no advantages. But at least they can say code pages were far worse :)
Sun sued Microsoft in 1996 for making nonportable extensions to Java (a license violation). Microsoft lost, and created C# in 2000.
At the time, “Starting Java” was the most feared message on the internet. People really thought that in-browser Java would take over over the world (yes Java, not Javascript)
Sun chose UTF16 in 1995 believing that Unicode would never need more than 64k characters. In 1996 that changed. UTF16 got variable length encoding and became a white elephant
So Microsoft chose UTF16 know full well that it had no advantages. But at least they can say code pages were far worse :)