A really good example of how APIs have changed the way we do things
is Amazon. Like,
in the early days,
back when they were just selling books and losing money,
Jeff Bezos decreed from on high that from now on,
different departments aren’t allowed to ask each other for information.
Like, if you’re in the marketing department,
you can’t go over to the sales department and say that,
can you give me the numbers on the sales of.
Blah, blah.
You’re not allowed to do that anymore.
If you want the information,
the sales department have to write an API for accessing that data,
and you
in the marketing department have to write software that uses that API
and pulls the information and displays it to you.
And Jeff Bezos said, if you don’t do that,
you’re fired. And that was genuinely the culture.
Like, people were scared of being fired,
so everyone did it. What it meant was, like,
you might have someone over here in Amazon who’s in charge of, like,
building the software that puts books online for sale,
and that person has written an API for.
For using that stuff.
And then someone else in a different department thinks, well,
you know what I mean? We could use that API to sell jewelry.
And so suddenly, Amazon is selling jewelry as well as books.
That’s how Amazon got to the point of, like,
selling it, like, anything they want to.