In the early 2000s, companies like Amazon, eBay, and Salesforce drove a trend toward standardizing interfaces among web applications. The result was a complete overhaul of how applications were developed and integrated, thanks to a growing network of open web APIs that anyone could consume.
During this period, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos wrote a memo to his employees that came to be known as the “Bezos API Mandate.” According to secondary sources, this mandate included two strategic requirements that any IT leader should consider when seeking to maximize the value of their development teams’ efforts. The first is that all interfaces among software developed by any team should be through APIs; the second is that teams should write internal APIs as if they were to be consumed by people outside the company.
