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23 June 2004   

 

Joel on Software: How Microsoft Lost the API War

It's Not 1990
From Joel's article: "Microsoft grew up during the 1980s and 1990s, when the growth in personal computers was so dramatic that every year there were more new computers sold than the entire installed base. That meant that if you made a product that only worked on new computers, within a year or two it could take over the world even if nobody switched to your product. That was one of the reasons Word and Excel displaced WordPerfect and Lotus so thoroughly: Microsoft just waited for the next big wave of hardware upgrades and sold Windows, Word and Excel to corporations buying their next round of desktop computers (in some cases their first round). So in many ways Microsoft never needed to learn how to get an installed base to switch from product N to product N+1. When people get new computers, they're happy to get all the latest Microsoft stuff on the new computer, but they're far less likely to upgrade. This didn't matter when the PC industry was growing like wildfire, but 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."
This article appears a few days ago, and I've been mulling it since then. I'm not really interested in the API thing more about the trends he talks so knowledgably about. Namely, the way Microsoft could rely on a huge number of new computers coming into the market, each with the newest version of the OS on them and how that relates to the forthcoming tsunami of smart mobile phones. They will have little computing power nor storage and will be in all but name network devices. This, will be the opposite of Microsoft betting its future business on rich client applications that rely on the raw power of the local machine.

So, who will win? The writers of network apps, like eBay, or the writers of rich client apps? Certainly both can win, after all there's so many computers out there mostly connected, mostly very powerful.

Why did Microsoft stall on MSIE? For the very reason they couldn't sell more OSs — who needs an OS when they're on the web?

Die MSIE, die!
From Joel's article: ...The Web user interface is about 80% there, and even without new web browsers we can probably get 95% there. This is 'Good Enough' for most people and it's certainly good enough for developers, who have voted to develop almost every significant new application as a web application.
Which means, suddenly, Microsoft's API doesn't matter so much. Web applications don't require Windows.
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. Promising new technologies like HTAs and DHTML were stopped in their tracks. The Internet Explorer team seems to have disappeared; they have been completely missing in action for several years. There's no way Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better than it already is: it's just too dangerous to their core business, the rich client.

Not that I fancy taking on Microsoft, but surely they're missing something here?

And there's Nokia investing in Mozila.

Was Russel Beattie right when he says that the US are ignoring the mobile phone as a platform?

 


1810 Also posted to: cyberSaps . At: 11:55:17 AM  . .
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Other title(s) for this story: Joel on Software: How Microsoft Lost the API War

 

 

BBC: New generation embraces mobiles

"There are lessons here for manufacturers concentrating on making phones as smart and function-filled as possible.
These include increasing the amount of space for storing texts, giving more indication of where calls are coming from and a better way of ordering all the information people are increasingly storing on phones."


1809 Also posted to: cyberSaps . At: 11:15:58 AM  . .
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Other title(s) for this story: BBC: New generation embraces mobiles

 

 

Photohop goes RDF with IPTC

From the press release; "Photographers and news services around the world use IPTC metadata schemas to embed identifying characteristics such as captions, credits, location and time and dates within digital photos and scans."
And from the RSS-Dev group Julian Bond asks, "Digital cameras use a different scheme don't they?
I have this dream that cellphone cameras will automatically embed geo lat/long data and time into the pictures they take before posting them onwards. It would be good if this was standardised early. If it hasn't already been done."
(via Andrew NewMan)
Thus, we could search the web for pictures of beauty spots or buildings. Tied in with times for events.
More grist for the RSS 1.0 boys.
 


1808 Also posted to: cyberSaps . At: 9:45:40 AM  . .
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Other title(s) for this story: Photohop goes RDF with IPTC