Joel On Microsoft's API Mistakes

AceMarkE writes "Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software has posted an article entitled "How Microsoft Lost the API War". He covers why the Win32 API is important to Microsoft, what they've done to keep it working, why Microsoft's switch to the .Net platform is both a good and bad idea, and why he feels the browser will be the real future of application development. Definitely worth a read no matter what your opinion of Microsoft is."

Comments

Re: DR DOS

[craXORjack]

Probably not unless you are a monopoly - and they weren't at that time, just aiming to be. And their aim was pretty accurate.

If you had followed the MS antitrust trial you should have learned that a company can hold a monopoly with as little as 30-40% of marketshare depending on the industry and other circumstances. MS had greater than 90% share of the IBM PC OS market right from the beginning when IBM began bundling it with their personal computers. So MS was unquestionably a monopoly from that point forward at least in the market for IBM and IBM compatibles. (Yes I am ignoring Apple here but they never stood a chance against IBM) Just because a federal judge had not yet ruled that MS holds a monopoly did not mean they didn't have one. The ruling just meant that MS needed to quit wasting the courts time by denying something so obvious.