Re: Interesting Article: How Microsoft Lost the API War

From: Ray Porter (ray_porter_at_unc.edu)
Date: 06/18/04 

Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 08:57:59 -0400

> Let me start with a couple of statements.
> 1. Web interfaces are poor at best, friends don't let friends do HTML.
> 2. I've never heard a end user ask for easy to deploy as they simply want
> usable functionality. Zero deployment is a cop out for poor technologists
> (I sometimes think that zero deployment means 'we keep putting out junk
> until we get lucky and get it right somehow').
> 3. .Net is a plan to reintroduce the GUI back into the game and hopefully
> overcome the weakness of thin applications.
>

A good post and mostly accurate. In our shop I think the drive for
thin-client, web-based apps (HTML/JSP "clients" with Java servlets on the
backend) is mostly powered by a management desire to eliminate the need to
ever provide any support at the end-user's workstation (along with a healthy
dose of anti-MS feeling). In short, they want to return to the days of 3270
dumb terminals and COBOL/CICS code. Any suggestion that a fat client might
offer the user more functionality is met with instant and scathing
criticism. Heck, even one of our Java champions who happens to prefer fat
Java applications delivered via WebStart is constantly shot down by the
department "gurus" when he suggests that our environment is far more complex
than necessary, stifles creativity with a one-solution-fits-all mindset and
delivers significantly less functionality.

If .Net is an effort to reintroduce the viability of the fat client, I hope
it's a huge success.

Ray Porter

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