Wednesday, June 16, 2004

A serious article on where Microsoft is losing ...

Joel on Software - How Microsoft Lost the API War
However, there is a less understood phenomenon which is going largely unnoticed: Microsoft's crown strategic jewel, the Windows API, is lost. The cornerstone of Microsoft's monopoly power and incredibly profitable Windows and Office franchises, which account for virtually all of Microsoft's income and covers up a huge array of unprofitable or marginally profitable product lines, the Windows API is no longer of much interest to developers. The goose that lays the golden eggs is not quite dead, but it does have a terminal disease, one that nobody noticed yet.

Spossky is taking a rather unusual position. Fascinating reading. It has implications for Google's IPO.

As someone who spent hard years building a complex and responsive web based application, I'm very sensitive to latency and UI issues. Spossky has a good point that Microsoft had a good solution set that they abandoned (I remember when they lost interest!) -- but that those solutions are slowly emerging. I think he underestimates Microsoft's ability to use IE to destroy the web, however.

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