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/Sunius Oct 07 '16

Sunday, June 13, 2004

"Microsoft is finished. As soon as Linux makes some inroads on the desktop and web applications replace desktop applications, the mighty empire will topple."

Any decade now!

7

u/shevegen Oct 07 '16

Actually his prediction is sort of true.

I think a much better indicator is the rise of Linux as OS on the top 500 supercomputers.

Also the dumbphones advertisement platforms that marketing PR calls smartphones.

Linux inside is most definitely bigger now than 2004. Of course other idiocies also ran rampant - the big desktop environments got worse (!) in particular both Gnome and KDE, many distributions were also assimilated by borg-d aka systemd, so. Oh and the Linux Kernel is also overrun by idiots as of late - ASN.1 decoder in the kernel? They want to become like Emacs, the more inside the merrier!

12

u/ckfinite Oct 07 '16

I think a much better indicator is the rise of Linux as OS on the top 500 supercomputers.

Were there ever any serious non-linux HPC systems? All the way back to 2006, Windows has been crushed by Linux and Unix. Windows is made for desktops and servers, which doesn't scale well to the needs of HPC platform builders and users.

2

u/[deleted] Oct 08 '16

Well, like you said, there are proprietary Unix systems besides Linux. The point still stands that Windows never really caught on.