The Long-Term Failure of Web APIs

You could look at it the other way...

Yes, those Web APIs broke things when they were deprecated and then removed - but in many cases they allowed progress and innovation to occur swiftly within the vendor that offered them.

Conversely, while it's true Homesite still runs on the latest version of Windows today, that fact it has that backwards compatibility is the root cause of a lot why many have found Windows today to be old-hat and lacking innovation in many places.

Apple made the difficult decision with OS X to break computability with OS 9 in order to build a better OS - which is akin to breaking their APIs.

We also live in an era of web-based software, which by its nature shouldn't be as affected by changes in web-based APIs given it's centralized nature. Sure we still need desktop software in places, and desktop software can consume web-APIs - but the original premise Nick makes is in-part caused by the difficulties with ensure users keep their desktop-software up to date.

(I was a big fan of Homesite - we built a lot of the BBC News Website template HTML in Homesite)