Vista's big problem: 92 percent of developers ignoring it
And to think Microsoft used to be popular with the developer crowd...
Not anymore. A recent report from Evans Data shows fewer than one in 10 software developers writing applications for Windows Vista this year. Eight percent. This is perhaps made even worse by the corresponding data that shows 49 percent of developers writing applications for Windows XP.
Such appreciation for history is not likely to warm the cockles of Microsoft's heart, especially when Linux is getting lots of love from developers (13 percent writing apps for it this year and 15.5 percent in 2009). The Mac? I don't have any equivalent data via Evans Data. But the Mac OS has rocketed by 380 percent as a targeted development platform, Evans Data told Computerworld.
The numbers don't get much better for Vista in 2009: 24 percent (compared with 29 percent for XP). That's a big step up from 8 percent, but is it a sign of momentum to come or just a temporary stopgap while developers wait until Windows 7?
Nor has Microsoft made it easy to develop Vista applications, according to an article in ITJungle.com:
Unfortunately, that improved security posture makes it more difficult for developers to write applications for Vista (read: no more kernel-level access and UAC to worry about), and it also causes compatibility problems with older applications. Ironically, the wave of attacks targeting operating system vulnerabilities has largely passed, and today hackers have moved on to target applications. At the same time, Microsoft has provided iterative improvements in Windows XP security, bolstering its status as "good enough" and further eating into Vista's pie.
Indeed. Microsoft doesn't need to handicap itself on the desktop given its difficulties competing everywhere else. With Linux and the Mac taking ever-increasing shares of the developer pie, Microsoft would do well to shore up developer support for Windows.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, that probably means re-investing in XP and forgetting its "New Coke" moment with Vista.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
I write an application and it just works on Vista and XP, I don't have to target Vista to make it work. I could use one of the new technologies like WCF and take advantage of some of the newer features of Vista, that is an option, not a requirement. The beauty is that I don't have to target a platform in .Net, it just works. Only misuse of a survey written to support a particular view could come up with such ridiculous results as this. The truth is that more than 92% of Windows developers use .Net and that means all of them develop products that do indeed work on Vista. The real story is that they are not ignoring it, they don't have to worry about it because it just works on Vista.
You can use data and statistics to bend a story anyway you want and you have obviously used this data to do that. It just shows the type of shotty, biased journalism I have come to expect from you.
I think if you asked Apple developers what was the minimum version of Mac OS's that they were targeting you would get similar results. A tiny amount would say they targeted OS 9, the bulk would say they targeted OS 10.3 and a small number would say their application required OS 10.5. Does that mean that very few developers write applications for OS 10.5? Of course not.
In the Mac world, it's the same way.
Win16 = Classic. Mostly dead. Abandonware aplenty.
Win32 = Carbon. Heavily in use by the heavy-hitters. Tons of old code still in use. Still getting updated.
.NET = Cocoa. The latest and greatest, where every new developer goes first.
...and like the Windows World, there are expected drivers/APIs for each major release, some cooler than others.
OS 9.2-10.2 is not developed for any more. Most other apps have 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5-specific versions (Source: http://www.versiontracker.com/ - a C|net site) and most of the 10.3 versions are no longer updated.
This is different from the "lowest common denominator" approach of Windows developers, so I can see how you made the assumption that most go for 10.3 and few for 10.5.
Either way.... this article WAS junk.
Since they aren't using Vista specific features it is easy to say the are not programming FOR IT. Since they are not, it means they are writing programs the way they were before which JUST HAPPEN to also work in Vista. Therefore they are programming MAINLY for XP. Again, they just also happen to work, for the most park, in Vista.
However, I do have many friends who are in the Wintel world and MOST of them avoid using Vista if they can.
I'll also take a stand and say that while I would very much like to see Microsoft stumble and fall, all manufacturers, software and hardware, have had their share of mistakes/failures. Microsoft has had a good run and the fact that Vista doesn't seem to be doing well should really be a surprise. It was bound to happen at some point.
I know some very smart people who won't use Vista. But this is usually because they are happy with XP (a valid reason) or because they refuse to educate themselves about Vista (which isn't a valid reason). For example, I've heard the argument that Vista is bad because of UAC, which is ignorant because UAC is nothing more than a more streamlined version of the "switch user" option from XP. It's not perfect, since a switch user option isn't what we want here (more of an "elevate user" option) and it's not always logical when it appears, but it's still an improvement over XP.
There's a bunch of other things like that but I think you get the idea.
However, if you tell me you won't upgrade to Vista because XP does the trick, then who am I to argue? You might want to reconsider when updates stop (has that happened already? Can't remember what the commitment was), though.
- by mikestatic1 June 16, 2008 10:20 AM PDT
- Good to see all of the Microsoft apologists out in force. Vista = failure. Accept it and move on.
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- by softwaredesignengineer June 17, 2008 10:42 PM PDT
- So you don't know anything about the .Net framework do you?
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