Power in computing has shifted from proprietary, Microsoft APIs to URLs on the Web and content provision, Google Vice President Adam Bosworth said during the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo on Friday.

There has been a shift from 10 years ago, he said. Developers for the most part no longer build applications with the client-server paradigm and database access in mind, with C++ and Visual Basic being the predominant languages, according to Bosworth.

"Mostly, what we see today is people building applications using things like PHP" (Hypertext Preprocessor) and the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python) stack, Bosworth said. He said his son is a PHP developer.

Applications used to be built via a "control model," with that weapon of control being leveraged by Microsoft via an API, Bosworth said. "This model was kind of a beautiful thing if you were Microsoft," said Bosworth, who formerly worked at Microsoft and BEA Systems.

"But the fact is, today I think this model is totally irrelevant," he said.