Lazycoder

Larry inadvertenly makes Joels point for him.

It’s the platform, Silly!

A while back Joel Spolsky made a heretical post about how Microsoft had lost the API war and web applications were the future

Many, people disagreed with this idea. But In his latest post, Larry Osterman, a distinguished Microsoft alumni, kind of drove home Joels point.

Larry’s point was that it’s nice to be able to develop for just one platform and he used IBMs open documentation of their hardware architecture as an example of how a single platform can spur development and in general makes it easier for developers to write applications.

Now along came Windows 1.0. It virtualized the video and printing interfaces providing, for the first time, a consistent view of ALL the hardware on the computer, not just disk and memory. Now apps could write to one API interface and not worry about the underlying hardware.
…
Fast forward to 1993 ñ NT 3.1 comes out providing the Win32 API set. Once again, you have a consistent set of APIs that abstracts the hardware and provides a constant API set. Win9x, when it came out continued the tradition. Again, the API is consistent. Apps written to Win32g (the subset of Win32 intended for Win 3.1) still run on Windows XP without modification. One set of development costs, one set of test costs. The platform is stable. With the Unix derivatives, you still had to either target a single platform or bear the costs of testing against all the different variants.
…
The existence of a stable platform has allowed the industry to grow and flourish. Without a stable platform, development and test costs would rise and those costs would be passed onto the customer.

That was the promise of the web. Being able to completely ignore the platform altogether. Web based client-server applications targeted a known platform, the browser, and allowed the user to use an application regardless. That continues to a certain extent, despite Larry’s employers bets effort to derail that promise. Look at the current flock of blogging software, you’d be hard pressed to find one that doesn’t have a web based interface for posting and in general that posting interface works across all the platforms and browsers. My hope is that the IE team will continue to upgrade their browser and bring it in line with the standards that are out there. Sure, standards are arbitrary but it’s the only leverage we have as developers. Otherwise we end up back in the early 90′s (or early 80′s in Larry’s story) having to develop and test for multiple browsers (hardware platforms).