[KLUG Advocacy] Really cool article

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> > How Microsoft Lost the API War
> > http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
> > Lots on .NET, ASP, thin web clients v. rich clients. The only software
> > pundit I trust worth a damn.
> Very good article! I THOUGHT I posted a link to it here not long ago
> myself, too...

A good article, but I disagree with an underlying premise.

"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"

Nah.  The API is irrelevant.  Porting apps from Win16 to Win32 was no
cake walk.  They've gone through DDE, OLE, etc... in various flavors.
App writers merrily recode - and could, if they chose, make those apps
available on other platforms (like the Mac) where the Windows API
doesn't and has never existed.

Microsoft's crown strategic jewel is...... Active-X.  The requirement
for IE to use MANY corporate sites keeps more desktops welded to M$ than
anything else. IMHO.

"Well, of course, that's a little bit silly: of course Apple and Sun can
sell computers, but not to the two most lucrative markets for computers,
namely, the corporate desktop and the home computer"

Which I think supports my point.  And No, IE doesn't *really* run on the
Mac or Solaris.

"Why? Because Apple and Sun computers don't run Windows programs,"

Because Apple and Sun computers don't run IE.

"might have implemented things like Avalon, the new graphics system, as
a series of DLLs that can run on any version of Windows and which could
be bundled with applications that need them. There's no technical reason
not to do this."

Wha!  There is a million technical reasons not to do this, and some
pretty important logistical ones.

"ignores the fact that the real way to make searching work is by making
searching work. Don't make me type metadata for all my files that I can
search using a query language. Just do me a favor and search the damned
hard drive, quickly, for the string I typed, using full-text indexes and
other technologies that were boring in 1973."

Oh, please. That is just silly.  Your going to do a full-text index for
twenty jillabytes of goop - and your result is going to be meaningless.

"So now instead of .NET unifying and simplifying, we have a big 6-way
mess, with everybody trying to figure out which development strategy to
use and whether they can afford to port their existing applications to
.NET."

Eh?  Does he understand the .NET architecture at all.  Java was
theoretically platform neutral, .NET is language neutral.  That's the
whole friggin' point.

"So you've got the Windows API, you've got VB, and now you've got .NET,
in several language flavors,"

No. Wrong.

"These are not all big issues. Some of them will be solved very soon by
witty Javascript developers. Two new web applications, Gmail and
Oddpost, both email apps, do a really decent job of working around or
completely solving some of these issues. And users don't seem to care
about the little UI glitches and slowness of web interfaces. Almost all
the normal people I know are perfectly happy with web-based email, for
some reason, no matter how much I try to convince them that the rich
client is, uh, richer."

Okay,  I want this guys users.

"Which means, suddenly, Microsoft's API doesn't matter so much. Web
applications don't require Windows."

Unfortunately, not true.  It should be true, but it ain't.