Wrong How Microsoft Lost the API War
By Joel Spolsky
Sunday, June 13, 2004
Printer Friendly Version
Here's a theory you hear a lot these days: "Microsoft is finished. As soon as Linux makes some inroads on the desktop and web applications replace desktop applications, the mighty empire will topple."
Although there is some truth to the fact that Linux is a huge threat to Microsoft, predictions of the Redmond company's demise are, to say the least, premature. Microsoft has an incredible amount of cash money in the bank and is still incredibly profitable. It has a long way to fall. It could do everything wrong for a decade before it started to be in remote danger, and you never know... they could reinvent themselves as a shaved-ice company at the last minute. So don't be so quick to write them off. In the early 90s everyone thought IBM was completely over: mainframes were history! Back then, Robert X. Cringely predicted that the era of the mainframe would end on January 1, 2000 when all the applications written in COBOL would seize up, and rather than fix those applications, for which, allegedly, the source code had long since been lost, everybody would rewrite those applications for client-server platforms.
Well, guess what. Mainframes are still with us, nothing happened on January 1, 2000, and IBM reinvented itself as a big ol' technology consulting company that also happens to make cheap plastic telephones. So extrapolating from a few data points to the theory that Microsoft is finished is really quite a severe exaggeration.
However, there is a less understood phenomenon which is going largely unnoticed: Microsoft's crown strategic jewel, the Windows API, is lost. The cornerstone of Microsoft's monopoly power and incredibly profitable Windows and Office franchises, which account for virtually all of Microsoft's income and covers up a huge array of unprofitable or marginally profitable product lines, the Windows API is no longer of much interest to developers. The goose that lays the golden eggs is not quite dead, but it does have a terminal disease, one that nobody noticed yet.
Now that I've said that, allow me to apologize for the grandiloquence and pomposity of that preceding paragraph. I think I'm starting to sound like those editorial writers in the trade rags who go on and on about Microsoft's strategic asset, the Windows API. It's going to take me a few pages, here, to explain what I'm really talking about and justify my arguments. Please don't jump to any conclusions until I explain what I'm talking about. This will be a long article. I need to explain what the Windows API is; I need to demonstrate why it's the most important strategic asset to Microsoft; I need to explain how it was lost and what the implications of that are in the long term. And because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize.
Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers
Remember the definition of an operating system? It's the thing that manages a computer's resources so that application programs can run. People don't really care much about operating systems; they care about those application programs that the operating system makes possible. Word Processors. Instant Messaging. Email. Accounts Payable. Web sites with pictures of Paris Hilton. By itself, an operating system is not that useful. People buy operating systems because of the useful applications that run on it. And therefore the most useful operating system is the one that has the most useful applications.
The logical conclusion of this is that if you're trying to sell operating systems, the most important thing to do is make software developers want to develop software for your operating system. That's why Steve Ballmer was jumping around the stage shouting "Developers, developers, developers, developers." It's so important for Microsoft that the only reason they don't outright give away development tools for Windows is because they don't want to inadvertently cut off the oxygen to competitive development tools vendors (well, those that are left) because having a variety of development tools available for their platform makes it that much more attractive to developers. But they really want to give away the development tools. Through their Empower ISV program you can get five complete sets of MSDN Universal (otherwise known as "basically every Microsoft product except Flight Simulator") for about $375. Command line compilers for the .NET languages are included with the free .NET runtime... also free. The C++ compiler is now free. Anything to encourage developers to build for the .NET platform, and holding just short of wiping out companies like Borland.
Why Apple and Sun Can't Sell Computers
Well, of course, that's a little bit silly: of course Apple and Sun can sell computers, but not to the two most lucrative markets for computers, namely, the corporate desktop and the home computer. Apple is still down there in the very low single digits of market share and the only people with Suns on their desktops are at Sun. (Please understand that I'm talking about large trends here, and therefore when I say things like "nobody" I really mean "fewer than 10,000,000 people," and so on and so forth.)
Why? Because Apple and Sun computers don't run Windows programs, or, if they do, it's in some kind of expensive emulation mode that doesn't work so great. Remember, people buy computers for the applications that they run, and there's so much more great desktop software available for Windows than Mac that it's very hard to be a Mac user.
Sidebar What is this "API" thing?
If you're writing a program, say, a word processor, and you want to display a menu, or write a file, you have to ask the operating system to do it for you, using a very specific set of function calls which are different on every operating system. These function calls are called the API: it's the interface that an operating system, like Windows, provides to application developers, like the programmers building word processors and spreadsheets and whatnot. It's a set of thousands and thousands of detailed and fussy functions and subroutines that programmers can use, which cause the operating system to do interesting things like display a menu, read and write files, and more esoteric things like find out how to spell out a given date in Serbian, or extremely complex things like display a web page in a window. If your program uses the API calls for Windows, it's not going to work on Linux, which has different API calls. Sometimes they do approximately the same thing. That's one important reason Windows software doesn't run on Linux. If you wanted to get a Windows program to run under Linux, you'd have to reimplement the entire Windows API, which consists of thousands of complicated functions: this is almost as much work as implementing Windows itself, something which took Microsoft thousands of person-years. And if you make one tiny mistake or leave out one function that an application needs, that application will crash.
And that's why the Windows API is such an important asset to Microsoft.
(I know, I know, at this point the 2.3% of the world that uses Macintoshes are warming up their email programs to send me a scathing letter about how much they love their Macs. Once again, I'm speaking in large trends and generalizing, so don't waste your time. I know you love your Mac. I know it runs everything you need. I love you, you're a Pepper, but you're only 2.3% of the world, so this article isn't about you.)
The Two Forces at Microsoft
There are two opposing forces inside Microsoft, which I will refer to, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as The Raymond Chen Camp and The MSDN Magazine Camp.
Raymond Chen is a developer on the Windows team at Microsoft. He's been there since 1992, and his weblog The Old New Thing is chock-full of detailed technical stories about why certain things are the way they are in Windows, even silly things, which turn out to have very good reasons.
The most impressive things to read on Raymond's weblog are the stories of the incredible efforts the Windows team has made over the years to support backwards compatibility:
