(2004-06-16) Joel Win Api Vs Web

Joel Spolsky on the death of the MsWindows API at the hands of the WebApp Thin Client model. Outside developers, who were never particularly happy with the complexity of Windows development, have defected from the Microsoft platform en-masse and are now developing for the web... A lot of us thought in the 1990s that the big battle would be between procedural and object oriented programming, and we thought that object oriented programming would provide a big boost in programmer productivity... The real significant productivity advance we've had in programming has been from languages which manage memory for you automatically. (Agile Programming Language) Microsoft would love for me to stop adding new features to our bug tracking (Issue Tracker) software and Content Management Software and instead waste a few months porting it to another programming environment, something which will not benefit a single customer and therefore will not gain us one additional sale, and therefore which is a complete waste of several months, which is great for Microsoft, because they have content management software and bug tracking software, too, so they'd like nothing better than for me to waste time spinning cycles catching up with the flavor du jour, and then waste another year or two doing an Avalon version, too, while they add features to their own competitive software... Now that the world is saturated with PCs most of which are Just Fine, Thank You, Microsoft is suddenly realizing that it takes much longer for the latest thing to get out there... And users don't seem to care about the little UI glitches and slowness of web interfaces. Almost all the normal people I know are perfectly happy with web-based email, for some reason, no matter how much I try to convince them that the Rich Client is, uh, richer... It's not that Microsoft didn't notice this was happening. Of course they did, and when the implications became clear, they slammed on the brakes.