SCN: API

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes

=========================

(Jesse Berst, Editorial Director, ZDNet AnchorDesk)---Want to know how 
Microsoft will try to take over the Web? They'll use the same bag of tricks 
they used to dominate the PC. And the most powerful trick is a morsel of 
computer knowledge well known to developers but obscure to almost 
everyone else: Application programming interfaces (APIs).

APIs are functions that allow software applications to talk to one another. 
Control over them is a key weapon Microsoft wields to make sure its 
software works better on Windows -- which is just another software 
application -- than anybody else's. The judge in the Microsoft antitrust case 
ruled that Microsoft must make its APIs open and available and, of course, 
Microsoft has balked and appealed.  

It's anybody's guess whether the ruling will stand up on appeal. I have my 
doubts. But today I'll tell you how Microsoft has used APIs, and what it tells 
us about the future.  

APIs have great power to save developers time and money. They don't 
have to invent a new way for their products to work with Windows every 
time they write a new program. APIs also provide a high degree of 
commonality among programs written for Windows.  

Microsoft already releases APIs to developers. But Microsoft has long been 
accused by developers of keeping some APIs to itself, giving its own 
software writers an edge. These are like back doors or secret passageways 
that only MS writers know about. Microsoft, of course, denies this.  

This is nothing new: Sun Microsystems and a host of other software 
companies have tried the same trick. Microsoft has just had more success 
at it.  

Here's the scenario: A small startup, using Windows APIs supplied by 
Microsoft, writes a program that turns out to be very popular. Microsoft -- no 
great innovator -- sees this and sets to write a similar program itself. But 
Microsoft has an advantage. It has all the APIs for Windows and can easily 
produce a viable or superior knock-off, undercutting its competitors and 
killing them.  

Microsoft knows the power of APIs very well. In his ruling against the 
company, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson not only found that the folks in 
Redmond had illegally leveraged Windows and its APIs to move into the 
browser market, but that MS had also stifled other technologies, such as 
Java, that would give developers another API to write to.

Microsoft recognizes that the open-source movement is gaining strength, or 
at least public appeal, and now plays footsie with the open-source 
advocates.  

Company President Steve Ballmer has repeated on several occasions over 
the last two years that Microsoft might be willing to make at least part of its 
Windows source code and APIs openly available.

Then in March, Microsoft reportedly offered to publish all of its APIs and 
Windows source code as part of a settlement of the antitrust suit. Nobody 
believed them.

When Microsoft got around to responding to the government's call for it to 
open up its APIs, the same company that denied the existence of secret 
APIs called the demand to release them robbery of its most basic 
intellectual property. Which is it?  

When Microsoft announced its Microsoft.Net new business strategy last 
week, Chairman Bill Gates conceded that while all users of .Net devices 
would have access to Microsoft's .Net infrastructure, those running the MS 
interface would work better.

Sound familiar?  

Windows APIs may become irrelevant before long. Microsoft has correctly 
realized that the focus is shifting away from the desktop PC. But beware. 
Windows APIs could soon be replaced by an equivalent stranglehold from 
Redmond.  

Copyright 2000 ZD Inc.




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