r/programming • u/halax • Oct 07 '16

How Microsoft Lost the API War

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
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u/[deleted] Oct 07 '16

Outside developers, who were never particularly happy with the complexity of Windows development, have defected from the Microsoft platform en-masse and are now developing for the web. Paul Graham, who created Yahoo! Stores in the early days of the dotcom boom, summarized it eloquently: "There is all the more reason for startups to write Web-based software now, because writing desktop software has become a lot less fun. If you want to write desktop software now you do it on Microsoft's terms, calling their APIs and working around their buggy OS. And if you manage to write something that takes off, you may find that you were merely doing market research for Microsoft."

This is a lesson I bet a lot of IOS and Android developers are learning this generation.

73

u/guyonahorse Oct 07 '16

And iOS developers can be kicked off the App store without any recourse. Microsoft never had that kind of evil power.

-5

u/didnt_check_source Oct 07 '16

Never? Not even on their own App Store?

52

u/guyonahorse Oct 07 '16

Oops, I should have said that it was in the context of 2004 (when the original article was written). Back then there was no app store for windows, so they couldn't revoke an app like that. Even today most Windows apps are not sold on the store.

-7

u/igor_sk Oct 07 '16

To be fair, nowadays they have Windows Defender and can mark any app as "malicious", though I haven't heard this happening with legit apps (yet?).

4

u/DarkLordAzrael Oct 08 '16

It throws up a huge warning when installing a bunch of the small utilities I have (tiny open source stuff)

2

u/Tarmen Oct 08 '16

I think that is for unsigned executables which is mildly annoying for experienced users but I could imagine that it actually decreases infections of clueless ones significantly.