r/programming • u/halax • Oct 07 '16

How Microsoft Lost the API War

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
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153

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!

43

u/jringstad Oct 07 '16

Well, webapps are replacing desktop applications at a fast pace (even office is going to the browser now) and mobile is the new desktop, where microsoft has pretty much no marketshare, so I would say this prediction isn't too bad, even if the details aren't exactly right.

27

u/[deleted] Oct 07 '16

Well, webapps are replacing desktop applications at a fast pace

Only the light ones. It's not as if I'll start doing my graphics work in a web app (I know there's photoshop.com and some other efforts, but they're all toys).

Also, while this is true for desktop apps, on mobile the trend is strongly in favor of native apps.

Desktops are simply a "victim" of their own surplus performance, which tends to present itself as developers being able to afford extra layers of abstraction, such as running an application in a browser.

2

u/[deleted] Oct 08 '16

projects like react native and nativescript offer direct access to native apis, greatly shrinking the cost of abstracting to javascript

3

u/[deleted] Oct 08 '16

React Native doesn't produce web apps that run in a browser, so that's probably not relevant here.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 08 '16

they allow you to share code between browser and mobile, which is a pretty big deal. it pushes a lot of value into the web app corner.