| Wednesday, July 21, 2004 |
17:13 - Written into a corner
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
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A long and interesting article by Joel Spolsky, heavy on the technical details and on the high-altitude orienteering, on the rather unenviable position Microsoft finds itself in today. According to him, Microsoft's attempts throughout the years to standardize APIs under its own control have backfired—"The new API is HTML, and the new winners in the application development marketplace will be the people who can make HTML sing."
Sent by Kris, who says:
Interesting. This gives more insight into why Microsoft is losing the security wars. Total spaghetti code. Lots of OS code exceptions for any major flaw in other applications. Multiple complex ways of doing the same thing. Warring factions.
I know that Apple has some of the same characteristics. I know personally of spaghetti patch code in the OS 9 era. "Back-patches". Shudder! OS X is a much cleaner, more long term implementation. Apple also doesn't suffer (as much) from internal group competition and seems to have better control on internal development direction. Apple will sacrifice older applications in the name of forward progress, one thing that Microsoft does well is backward compatibility. But for how much longer? The WinFX file system could be a problem for older programs expecting a traditional file system layout.
I think the words "next generation" must be a dirty word at Microsoft—because with the installed base they've got, every "next generation" implies yet another "previous generation" that they can't afford to let go of. I know they've got all kinds of cool stuff going on in the blue-sky labs in Redmond, but none of it will ever see the light of day. It can't. Wall-sized touch-screens where if you gesture to move an icon into a far corner, it figures out what vector you're moving it on and what destination you probably have in mind, and then balloons the destination icon (like, say, the Recycle Bin) in towards you as though on rubber bands, and snaps it back into place when you drop the icon into its place? Fascinating, but this world is still just getting comfortable with the Start menu.
Apple's guardian angel is its small market share, which allows it to leap forward into unknown territory without having to worry that it's alienating hundreds of millions of users. That and its benevolent-dictator corporate model...
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Brian Tiemann
