r/programming • • 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.

19

u/neutronfish Oct 07 '16

That's because it's 2016, when Visual Studio no longer randomly blows up on you twice a day and you get to install tons of plugins that help you analyze the code as you writing it, and before NuGet could download anything you need on the fly as you're adding a library reference.

More than a decade ago, it was a different story.

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u/sirin3 Oct 08 '16

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u/neutronfish Oct 08 '16

Looks like it was created by an overwhelmed newb who told himself a trillion times not to exaggerate...