[johns]

This really depends on the type of business behind the API. Transactional API models have worked really well (Expedia affiliates, payment gateways, messaging). It's really only been a problem for providers who didn't properly align their interests with the consumer of the API meaning one side of the equation was getting far more value than they were contributing. This tends to be most common in consumer service APIs.

I wrote a little bit about this here: http://thenextweb.com/dd/2013/03/12/apis-are-dead-long-live-...