Joel on Software – How Microsoft Lost the API War:
How Microsoft Lost the API War
So Joel is in a funk that MSFT has lost its way: by cutting off compatibility with older applications, it’s alienating its base.
I was surprised to learn than its common to write special code in windows to account for application bugs, to preserve their longevity through upgrades. So a program that took advantage of some quirk or other in WIN98 but breaks in 2000 would have had some exception code written to accommodate it.
This seems dumb to me: if you go to the trouble of publishing specs and practically giving away tools (Joel talks about the thin line between wooing developers and wiping out makers of competing tools), wouldn’t it be easier and more sensible to push those changes back to the developer and reduce the reliance on these accommodations? Could this explain the notorious flakiness of Windows in general?
Eh, they can afford it, so they do it. But apparently, the costs of doing that in Longhorn are too high or perhaps the internal political reasons described in the piece are the reason, but now if things break, they stay broken.
Joel goes on to talk about the Mac, small market share, blah blah, and how older apps don’t run on newer versions. He neglects to mention that Apple went through a hardware transition (in 1993) where just about everything worked with no effort on the part of the user, and less than a decade later, a complete architectural change, with less backward compatibility (most on the hardware level) but still a long way from just cutting people off. And there are applications that run on the 1984 Mac and OS X: see if that claim can be made for Windows.
At the same time, Apple simplified and decrufted it’s API (Carbon) in anticipation of OS X and continued to refine it. It looks like MSFT could learn a few things from Apple, but then, they’ve been doing that for years.
As for his claim that there are so many more useful applications for Windows than the Mac, I’m sure he can find some esoteric segment where Windows users are better served (or he can just cite games), but for most of what people do — general office apps, web and email use — it’s pretty even, and funnily enough, MSFT supplies apps to both camps.
I’ve read a few Joel screeds and while he writes well and clearly, he’s still a Windows fanboy.