| Main |

The Slow Death of the Windows API

Posted on Wednesday, June 16, 2004

Joel Spolsky has written an important document:

Joel on Software - How Microsoft Lost the API War

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.

It's long, but you should read the whole thing. Joel is hardly anti-Microsoft, and he knows whereof he speaks when it comes to building apps for Windows, so when he says that MS's strategy for developers is fundamentally borked, you should listen.

Leave a comment


Recently on Just Well Mixed

Going Meta

Syndicate Me, Baby

Feed iconWeb feed

Share and Enjoy

Except where otherwise noted, all content on this site is provided under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Obligatory Disclaimer

If you think anything I write here represents the opinions of anybody but myself, you need more help than I can give you. The opinions are all mine, folks. Nobody else's.

If that's too hard to understand... well, I'm sorry. There's only so much I can do. I'm not a therapist, and I'm not a miracle worker. I wish I could help you work through your delusional belief that I'm speaking for anyone else but myself. Honestly, I do. But in the end, that's a monkey you'll have to get off your back on your own. Sorry.