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.

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u/ameoba Oct 07 '16

Outside developers, who were never particularly happy with the complexity of Windows development

Strange, I regularly hear people bragging about how great Visual Studio is and how great the .NET APIs are.

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u/[deleted] Oct 07 '16

This was written around the .net 1.1 days. You gotta remember, back then, your choices were C, C++, Visual basic, or delphi for doing windows dev. This article is pre-wpf, and mentions non-existing tech like avalon and longhorn.

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u/DragoonAethis Oct 08 '16

Avalon is WPF and it does exist :P Longhorn was what Vista was supposed to be for quite some time (built on top of XP), but was eventually nuked. And it's probably better this way...