Our comments and trackback policy You Link We Follow, You Comment We Promote
Stats have proved that Vista is not getting any popularity among developers. Report from Evans Data tells that Vista is ignored by 92% of the developers (North America only), leaving only 8% of the developers who are writing applications for Vista the current year. However the numbers are expected to increase thrice (24%) the current figure (dreadful for Windows but may prove good for others) by 2009.
380 developers were surveyed, among which only 8% were writing for Vista and to make things worse, 49% were still writing for Windows XP. One of the reasons might be the release of Windows 7 which is due next year. According to another report, 73% of the market share is still maintained by XP.
According to president and CEO of Evans Data, John Andrews:
The general theme has been a slower uptake (of Vista) in the user market so most people at the corporate enterprise and commercial world are staying with XP
On the other hand Mac OS has boomed the developers platform by 380%.
Open-source alternatives like Linux continue to take on interest
Mac OS is also acquiring significant interest among North American developers. Although unlikely to displace Windows volume, Mac OS experienced 50% growth as a primary development platform and 380% growth as a targeted platform during the period.
John added.
By 2009, 15% of developers are expected to write on Linux. Microsoft has yet to comment on this.
Evans Data CEO also said
(Developers) see a market shift from XP to Vista and that is why they are saying they are going to be moving from XP to Vista (in 2009)
It seems that Steve Ballmer’s obsession for developers couldn’t help out the situation.
Being a former developer, I didn’t find Windows Vista that catchy, though it has some better aspect over XP. This is the case with most of the developers. The thing is that they are not willing to risk Vista over XP. This was the point I wanted to make in my earlier post. Vista maybe a good option for some people but not for every community (in this case, developers). If it fails to gain that much popularity in the near future then XP will have to stick in the market, at least until the release of Windows 7.
