Two years ago, the number of developers writing applications for the Microsoft Windows platform fell, while the opposite was true for Linux -- this has now become a trend.
Instead of the Web stealing away Windows Users, as people have predicted for years, it's Linux and handheld devices.
According to analysts at the Evans Data Corporation research house, 64.8 percent of North American developers are writing software for Windows, down from 74 percent only a year ago.
The decline in popularity of the world's most prevalent operating systems appears to coincide with the rise of Linux, as the number of developers targeting the open-source environment has gone up by three percentage points from 8.8 percent to 11.8 percent in the same year. The research group expects the number to drop another 2 percent in the coming year.
John Andrews, president of Evans Data, said this week that a shift away from Windows began about two years ago. "The data shows that this migration is now accelerating. Linux has benefited, but we also see corresponding growth in niche operating systems for non-traditional client devices," he said, adding that the development landscape was changing.
The popular notion among tech industry followers is that a more capable Web browser, able to run sophisticated applications either online or offline, will make the desktop operating system less important, if not irrelevant.
Many companies -- even Microsoft -- are taking up the idea of building a "Web, or cloud, operating system" for which developers can write online.
Even with more online applications, though, the Evans Data study notes that Windows desktop application development remains steady.
The study also predicted that, although Javascript is by far the most widely used scripting language among North American developers, Ruby would see a 50 percent increase in popularity over the next year.
In other findings, it seems that a third of developers are currently working with virtualisation, with more than 40 percent set to join them in the next year.
Microsoft was unable to comment by press time.
David Meyer reported for ZDNet UK from London
CNET News.com's Martin LaMonica contributed to this report.
1
clausewicz - 09/07/07
When Microsoft introduced .NET they abandoned ASP (their prior web platform) and also abandoned VB6. That amounts to over 3 million programmers in North America alone.
Most of those formerly Microsoft-dependent developers have not moved to .NET and have instead either stayed with VB6 and ASP (there are still far, far more ASP pages on the Internet than .NET ASPX pages) or gone on to non-proprietary web development (Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache, Linux).
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2
Jason Knight - 09/07/07
Hate to point this out, but could we have some information on pool size and demographics? With those percentages it's entirely possible that the number of windows programmers may have stayed exactly the same or even gone up, despite the percentage going down - all it would take is changing the pool size.
I'm highly suspicious of percentages being 'thrown out' into the wild since without the numbers to back it up it's little more than card stacking and glittering generalities. One would HOPE they kept the pool size the same and polled the same demographic two years in a row, but without details of who was asked and how many were asked - those percentages are flat out meaningless.
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3
Mark C - 12/07/07
*** With those percentages it's entirely possible that the number of windows programmers may have stayed exactly the same or even gone up, despite the percentage going down - all it would take is changing the pool size. ***
Yeah but frankly who cares? What matters is market share. And if the decrease in Windows and increase in Linux developers is all new developers rather than switcher (extremely unlikely) then that would be even more telling.
*** One would HOPE they kept the pool size the same ***
Huh? Now you seem to be using "pool size" to mean something totally different -- the sample size of the survey. And keeping the sample size the same is not in fact a statistical necessity. Both samples simply need to be large enough to draw a statistical inference.
Frankly you don't seem like a very quanititative guy.
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