New Delhi Times - Gaurav Bhatnagar reporting from New Delhi, India

Microsoft is going to offer new MSN APIs which will allow developers to access MSN Search, VirtualEarth, Messenger and MapPoint programatically and build their own applications around them. This is great! The new WWW is all about open APIs. Actually, Messenger APIs were available earlier as well. But only the most basic UI automation API was made available freely. The more useful API functions required use of a key from Microsoft which, from what I can make out, was almost impossible to get. I used these APIs quite a bit while I was with Microsoft. I hope the new APIs are not going to be just these old APIs repackaged differently.

Though Microsoft has finally arrived, I wonder why it was so late to the web APIs party. If you think about it, the credit for success of Windows platform goes to a large extent to the ease with which you can develop applications on it. The Win32 API along with VB saw hundereds of thousands of developers choose the Windows platform instead of Apple or Unix. For Windows division, developer audience has been super important, almost more important than the end user. Microsoft couldn't possibly ship everything that an end user wanted. But by making Windows an easy to program platform, they ensured that almost any possible useful application would eventually be written by somebody outside of Microsoft. The same logic should have been applied to the web and MSN from day one. Microsoft could have gone ahead and created a "web platform" similar to Windows for desktop - complete with easy to use APIs. But instead, earlier attempts at providing APIs were very half hearted and hardly evangelized. I hope this time around things will be different. We will know in 2 days, when MSN unveils its shining new APIs here.