Nilesh's Weblog

MS's Multiple Personality Disorders

In his article on MS and its most important asset - the Windows API, Joel Spolsky talks how, trying to lock people on .NET technologies and at the same time promoting the incompatible Longhorn and Avalon platforms, Microsoft is on a new strategy to keep developers on tethers. Unfortunately for them, developers have started to realize this and have started moving towards Web applications. Developing ‘rich clients’ is suddenly uncool and unprofitable. Joel quotes Paul Graham of Yahoo! Stores on this -

There is all the more reason for startups to write Web-based software now, because writing desktop software has become a lot less fun. If you want to write desktop software now you do it on Microsoft's terms, calling their APIs and working around their buggy OS. And if you manage to write something that takes off, you may find that you were merely doing market research for Microsoft.

Joel goes on to explain how the ‘Feature’ camp has won over the ‘Backwards Compatibility’ camp inside Microsoft, and in turn caused Microsoft to lose the API war. A very interesting read.