I remember, way back when (yawn), when I had to integrate Lotus 123 with data from a mainframe through a terminal emulator - both running on a DOS PC. It wasn't easy to get these two products to integrate but thanks to both DOS products having at least a nominal API, it was possible and added significant productivity gains over the manual re-keying of the data.

27 years later, I find most enterprise users still running desktop applications with no API's or integration capabilities what so ever at the desktop. Even new applications fall foul of this. Amongst the many other pains this causes our users, dramatic productivity improvements are missed because user workflows across multiple applications are mostly manual.

There are tools today that can "instantly" create API's into any existing (new or old) desktop application. With that, productivity gains are seen immediately. These API's are client side and can even be exposed as Web Services.

I have some thoughts about why the problem still exists today. I'll share that later. What are your thoughts?