“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).”
“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.”
“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.”