Thomas - re: they, and they alone, will establish what interfaces are available to independent developers (while providing other, more functional, interfaces to their own developers and privileged partners)
The non-published APIs are also not supported, not maintained, not a part of the standard test suites. We all know of instances where both MSFT internal people, and third party developers, found and exploited unpublished APIs. I don't think there was a set of "good" APIs that the internal people got to use - most of the ones I worked with were not as robust as the published APIs, not particularly better except for some very specific uses, and disappeared between service packs like smoke on a windy day. It's hard to believe that there was a lot of development done to the shadow APIs, but I don't really know.
As far as not porting any more, I spent a lot of time in the early 80s developing a bunch of tools to enable p-code, then any language with a p-code compiler could run them. Didn't happen. C and C++ were supposed to be the next portable wave, and they were close to the machine. Didn't happen either. Maybe this time it will, since the web provides a "generic" interface model. |
