Survey: Developers Targeting Windows Less Often
August 1, 2007 —
Could a trickle of developers in Canada, Mexico and the United States shifting away from Windows signal a coming torrent? Surveys published by Evans Data over the past two years have concluded that there is an accelerating trend of developers abandoning Windows clients as target platforms, and Evans forecasts that the trend will continue in favor of developing for embedded platforms and Linux.
The latest numbers, published by Evans in its biannual North American Development Survey on July 3, indicate that development specifically for the Windows operating system has declined by 12 percent from one year ago, continuing a two-year slide.
Whether the same trend is occurring worldwide is unknown. Evans has not yet released its latest updates for the Asia-Pacific and Europe-Middle East-Africa regions.
In 2006, 74 percent of survey participants said that they were writing applications for some version of Windows. This year, that number fell to 64.8 percent from an equal sample, and Evans expects another 2 percent drop in the coming year.
There is one bright side for Microsoft: Evans found that Windows use by developers themselves has remained steady.
Changing Landscape
The survey found that the number of developers writing specifically for Linux had increased 34 percent, from 8.8 percent of respondents a year ago to 11.8 percent today. The data also shows that there was corresponding growth in development for embedded operating systems. “The landscape is changing,” said John Andrews, president and CEO of Evans in a prepared statement.
Evans did not divulge its methodology and other supportive information except to say that the responses came from a pool of over 400 developers, from a variety of industries spread across development types.
Microsoft declined to comment on the Evans survey. It is a client of Evans’ and a member of its advisory board.
Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, an independent organization of experts that tracks Microsoft, speculated, “It could well be that people are choosing Linux or another [platform] because they already have a strong Windows offering.
“The key question you would have to see would [be]: ‘Why are you choosing this platform?’ to make the data interesting,” continued Cherry.
Other findings from the survey show that JavaScript is the most widely used scripting language, eclipsing PHP, Python and Ruby. However, Ruby usage is expected to increase by half over a year’s time.
Additionally, a third of North American developers are working with virtualization, and its adoption is expected to increase by 42.5 percent within a year.
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