I was wikipedia’ing the word “Portal” today at work and stumbled across an interesting article from Joel on Software (if you have never read his blog, you might as well read up… because it full of pure gold) on how Microsoft has “Lost the API War”… written in 2004. Its interesting to see his points in this article and how they parallel with what Microsoft has done with SharePoint 2007. From what I can tell, he was “dead on” and Microsoft (despite being accused of often times being slow to market) was able to notice the same trends and create a viable contender for continuing its domination over the API through SharePoint 2007 and the web. If you don’t feel like reading the whole post I’ll sum it up with a quote:
“None of this bodes well for Microsoft and the profits it enjoyed thanks to its API power. The new API is HTML, and the new winners in the application development marketplace will be the people who can make HTML sing.” – Joel on Software (June 2004)
Fast forward three years and it looks like Microsoft may have achieved that. Sure its not quite perfect still, but I think SharePoint does a better job of fitting what Joel was talking about then most other options available today, especially for the enterprise marketplace.