What the big companies are realising is this: When you get lots of small developers using your API, you have tens of thousands of people who are actively marketing your product through your API.

You don't need to build up any large marketing force anymore, just let the developers do for you. For example, facebook connect drives people to facebook, etc. The web is becoming an OS, and the big companies are trying to achieve developer lock-in by offering a lot of convenience APIs and platforms.

He who gets the developers will get the users.

It was fun to laugh at at the time, but Steve Ballmer has known this for awhile. Remember his big, sweaty "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!" rant?

Never forget that Microsoft is at heart a languages company. They came from writing computer languages and detoured into operating systems. Frankly, they've always been very, very good to developers.

They've always known that the developers matter.

I still wish MS would ship windows with a usable console.

Windows 7 ships with PowerShell.

Windows 7 hasn't officially shipped yet.

I've been using Windows 7 for a month now as my primary OS. Works fine.

If you're still running Windows XP, Vista, 2003, or 2008, you can download PowerShell from the Download Center or get it as a recommended update via Windows Update.

>> Frankly, they've always been very, very good to developers.

Except when they told everyone to develop for OS/2 - while secretly porting their Mac Apps to Windows 3.

I was a Mac app startup in the days of Mac-128, OS/2 and Windows 1.0. Far from evangelizing OS/2, Microsoft sent Tandy Trower (a very important development manager, still at Microsoft) down to the Valley to visit us and urge us to develop our Mac app for Windows. He told us then that Microsoft was working on Windows versions of its Mac apps. And we were surely not the only Mac startup that Tandy had on his list of visits to make in the Valley. It has always seemed to me that developers who prioritized OS/2 over Windows were fooling themselves (easy to do, since IBM was so important then and backing OS/2), not being fooled by Microsoft.

The "API Basics" PDF doc states that you must a) have an API ID and b) limit your Queries Per Second (QPS) to 7/second.

'b)' sounds like a usage quota to me.

I don't think b) sounds like usage quota.

If you have an unlimited ride Metro Card, you can use it as many times as you want during the month but you won't be able to swipe it back to back to prevent abuse.

Similarly, 7 queries per second is a decent limit as it allows you to send more than half a million queries (Exact number = 604800 queries) in a day.

Total number of queries for a day doesn't really matter much if your peak traffic is above a per-second usage quota. That being said, I think the quota is pretty generous.

Cool, but a pain for most (existing) commercial usage:

“On any page in which you display Bing results, you will only display advertising that we serve or provide.”

Not sure how most sites could do that-- you could even read this jerkily as saying you'd be restricted from even advertising your own products on a page with Bing results.

Microsoft seems to be on the roll (or should I say 'on the bing')

With the smooth loading bing and now the open API, Microsoft seems to be taking the battle straight to Yahoo and Google's court. This time Microsoft does seem to 'get' the future of search, and with Bartz screwing up the Yahoo open API program (with usage quotas and all) and Google just plan scared of releasing its own, the folks at Redmond seem poised for the next big leap in search.

I am not really a Microsoft fan, and use tons of great Google products, but search needs to move ahead, much faster than what Google is taking it.

Nice to see. Google got rid of their non-Javascript API, IIRC, so Yahoo was the only one with a decent API.

Google has a JSON-based API: http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/documentation/#fonje

Its misleadingly named, hard to find, etc etc, but it exists. :/

I only hope this might nudge Google to re-open their API.

The live api was around for a while and I'm pretty sure it's just a name change.

Site currently seems bombed and google cache comes up empty. Anyone have a mirror?

Edit: Seems to work for me too now. For anyone interested, there's a bing developer site which has more extensive information.

http://www.bing.com/developers/

Came up fine for me.

I'm as much a fan of free, hackable APIs as anyone. But... how is this not a really clear anti-trust violation? It's one thing for MS to release a product that competes directly against Google's free offerings. Quite another to use its revenue from other sources to undercut Google's pay services. MS isn't competing on price here at all.

Maybe, I suppose, the argument would be that a target Google's size is so large that MS has no effective monopoly power to leverage. Google could just as easily (and, in many areas, is) fund free alternatives to MS software too. But still, this seems like a borderline-scary regression to some pretty ugly MS behavior.

Proving that someone is committing anti-trust violation against Google's search business is a very uphill task.

That the party you accuse is Microsoft makes only a little difference.

I would reply with something interesting, but clearly I've angered the downvote police, so I officially declare myself intimidated into submission.

Don't be fooled: I accidentally upvoted him because his retort felt sensible, but then I read his post, which rang of blatant trolling.