Is Microsoft Killing the Windows Monopoly?
by Alan Spaeth
June 17, 2004
The most recent issue of Brian Livingston's paid newsletter (http://www.windowssecrets.com) mentions a fascinating article on Joel Spolsky's blog (http://www.joelonsoftware.com). Spolsky's "How Microsoft Lost The API War" article is at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html. It's kinda long, but I highly recommend it.
His key argument is that Microsoft through its actions is leading developers to write more and more apps for the web rather than for the increasingly shifting and, more importantly, not backward-compatible Microsoft platforms.
Developers naturally don't want to keep rewriting or porting their apps to Microsoft's latest development environment. And Microsoft's clear intent is for the "Longhorn" relase in 2006+ to be a forklift upgrade that gets rid of Win32 and stresses the importance of a new and different "rich client".
My view is that Microsoft has gotten so used to being a monopoly and, now that it knows the Feds won't actually do anything about it, Microsoft doesn't care about backward compatibility anymore. They're addicted to customers doing constant upgrades and figure they can force march everyone (users and developers) on to whatever Microsoft's new stuff is.
But even if everyone wanted to go to Microsoft's latest, uptake of any new platform is always gradual. This means that any apps written for MS's new APIs wouldn't run on older versions of Windows and the vast number of apps written for older versions of Windows wouldn't run on Longhorn.
In my view, if Microsoft keeps to this path, they've doomed themselves.
What's so wonderfully ironic is that, according to Spolksy, Microsoft is effectively doing themselves exactly what they feared would happen with Netscape - "commoditizing the operating system" because apps are written for the HTTP API rather than for the Windows API.