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APIs: Microsoft's hidden full nelson

Jesse Berst AnchorDesk

Published: 28 Jun 2000 13:07 BST

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.

THE POWER OF APIs
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.

Read on...