How Microsoft Lost…
Let me now become the 99,000th person to link to Joel Spolsky’s How Microsoft Lost the API War. One thing all of us linkers had in common is that we almost wrote that article ourselves, and certainly would have if only we’d been clever about something besides the decorations on our mediocrity.
In fact, I did write an article here about a nice young man who built this cute little .NET application — that took 80MB of downloads before you could run it. Well, perhaps I exaggerate, but it’s really almost that bad. Microsoft, a company that prides themselves on eating their own dogfood, seems to be pissing in that dogfood.
By turning their backs on the Win32 API, Microsoft is risking not only the debacle of releasing a new operating system and no one will care (blithely ignoring how close they came to that very thing with 2003 Server), but they’re risking something even worse. They may wake up one rainy morning to find some collective of hippies squatting at SourceForge has taken over effective ownership of the Win32 API and are producing GPLed killer apps with it that force users off of Longhorn and its successors.
Mind you, some of us blogging on this article are pissed off that our knowledge has become obsolete overnight, but software geeks are far from stupid people, and despite the smoke and lights from the man behind the curtain, the business case for .NET simply isn’t there. Having learned QT and XSLT last year and Integrity this year for projects where I did see a business case, I think I can survive if somebody decides to call me a Luddite who’s unwilling to learn.
This is almost a “contractual obligation” article right here. It’s an important notion flying around the net, and I’d better mention it. And perhaps I may even figure out a practical lesson to be drawn from it: like not turning your back on your past accomplishments. Or maybe not.