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.
View: Full Article @ CNet News Blog
For now they can focus on 100% of the market by targetting XP, and the only people who complain will be people on the bleeding edge, not sys admins or grandma or mom & dad who just want to use a computer. When Vista has the majority of the market and people who use XP are no longer buying software, then it will be a lot more attractive to focus on it.
If 1/10 developers are working on Vista, then it's just enough for right now. And if you think about it, Vista software is 90% the same as XP, there are just a few things that require special attention and that's what the 10% are focusing on for now. Maybe in a little while when that changes, people will start designing for the ground-up with Vista in mind (whatever that changes).
Umm no. c|net has a horribly ignorant anti-Microsoft bias that makes their writers look like poorly trained monkeys, that's why it's garbage.
It makes sense to me, when I tested server 08: blackice wasn't (and still isn't) supported so neither is it on pista, and thats an IBM program!
It makes sense to me, when I tested server 08: blackice wasn't (and still isn't) supported so neither is it on pista, and thats an IBM program!
Uh. BlackICE is a dead program. It hasn't been updated in a while, and likely never will be again. Why would a complex firewall designed for an old network stack work on a new OS with a brand new network stack?
how can only half of developers be making apps for windows xp? what are the other half doing?
and surely if you're writing an app for xp you are also wrting it for vista and vice versa in most cases. i'm really not getting their data.
I'd laught at all those the dumb MS bashers... if they weren't eating peoples' brains right before my eyes!
90% of all statistics can be made to say anything, 50% of the times.
LOL
it's a fact that developers don't care about vista, many applications (for example) ask for disable UAC prior to install it, other simply are unable to run correctly on vista. If an application runs on Vista usually is not because developers did spend time on vista but most a causality (or because vista is in some extend compatible with xp).
Any developer who codes something that can't run as a Limited User without a very good reason should not be allowed within 50 feet of a compiler. Ever.
Over 95% of all A+ software works absolutely beautifull on Vista.
Ranting Vista isn't cool anymore people, move along..
Every self respected Windows platform programmer is programming to the .NET platform. Especially version 2.0 or higher. Because doing so, gives you the security features you need, without worrying if a machine is patched or not. Also gives you the flexibility to write once and target any platform that supports .NET (including PDAs, and some Linux distros, using mono).
Siverlight 2 for example has a subset of the .NET 2.0 framework built-in, so that makes it available to most OS out there.
The point I want to make is that programmers write to a specific framework nowadays, not a platform. So that survey is horsesh...t. CNET is just looking for some more Vista flamers. It is very sad to see a news organization being so biased and at the same time sees Google as a godsend, no matter how much they trample on your freedom of privacy (everything you do, using their wares, they know about). Vista is the next wave of OS, so they might as well pull their head out of their asses and start reporting issues that matters to the community.
The Evans Data press release is really vague. It's doesn't say what they consider to be a "Vista" application, though with 8% I'd have to believe it's software that runs on .NET 3.0 (WPF/WCF). If i were to take a stab, I would guess the real reasons are (but not limited to):
- XP has been around a long time; long enough that most desktop applications have been conceived and developed. There's not a slew of new software that needs to be written, and existing applications aren't going to be rewritten to use newer technologies unless there's a compelling reason.
- It costs a lot of money to retrain developers.
- XP users could potentially have to download a 200MB runtime. This could complicate things depending on the target audience and deployment method.
There are so many great time-saving, headache-reducing improvements in the newer framework versions, that I would place "developer hate" as one of the last reasons for the low adoption percentage.
Ya i agree with some.. wtf is up with cNet?? they used to be good! lol
Vista is not a failure.. it just wasn't marketed enough.
I, being a software and web developer, have actually been enjoying Vista... sure there's minor bugs here and there.. but nothing that prevents me from making good apps to work.
If you're gonna be a developer.. ur gonna have to learn to make things compatible with all OS's your target audience is using.
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