The first substantive thing I wrote, on September 25, 2010, was called “The API Economy.” The argument was that APIs were driving the internet and the economy — developers relying on them for data and functionality, businesses exchanging services through them, the press using them for real-time analysis. And the comparison that has framed my whole career: in 2000, businesses were still working out why they needed a website; in 2010, they were facing the same realization about APIs.
It was never a marketing term for me. It was an observation that economic value was moving through these interfaces, and that the movement was going to keep growing.
Fifteen years on, the observation holds and the framing has matured. APIs turned out to be the next step of the web rather than a trend on top of it. The value is overwhelmingly in integration and internal operations rather than in public API marketplaces, which is not what the early enthusiasm predicted. Regulation became one of the strongest adoption drivers, which nobody predicted. And the politics turned out to matter as much as the technology, which I did not sufficiently appreciate in 2010.
The part that has not changed: an API has no value until it is actually used, and most of the economy is still being built.
