According to an article in Infoworld today:
A survey this spring of more than 400 developers and IT managers in North America found that the number of developers targeting Windows for their applications declined 12 percent from a year ago. Just 64.8 percent targeted the platform as opposed to 74 percent in 2006.
(source)
That’s a HUGE YOY decline. Now – it isn’t the complete collapse that the Java community were predicting a decade ago, but they are numbers that Microsoft’s DPE group should be VERY worried about. I’d love to be a fly on the wall at Sanjay‘s review with Bill and Steve. Note that the people surveyed weren’t “Web 2.0 developers trying to build massively scalable applications on the smell of an oily rag and hence using the freely available LAMP stack”. They were “developers at enterprises and solution providers”.
So why the decline? The article points to Vista being delayed and open source maturation. Frank? Kordahi? Any insights into why 12% of the developers abandoned you?