{"id":679,"date":"2008-06-16T17:46:57","date_gmt":"2008-06-16T16:46:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/?p=679"},"modified":"2008-06-16T17:46:57","modified_gmt":"2008-06-16T16:46:57","slug":"why-developers-dont-write-apps-for-vista","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/679-why-developers-dont-write-apps-for-vista.html","title":{"rendered":"Why developers don\u2019t write apps for Vista"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n<p>From Evans Data we get <a href=\"http:\/\/www.evansdata.com\/press\/viewRelease.php?pressID=135\" target=\"_blank\">this statistic<\/a> (email address required):<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Only eight percent of North American software developers are currently writing applications to run on Microsoft&#8217;s Vista operating system, while half are still writing programs for XP, according to Evans Data&#8217;s Spring 2008, North American Development Survey. These same developers forecast a fragmented Windows market in 2009 with only 24 percent expecting to target Vista and 29% expecting to continue with XP.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>Matt Asay picks this up, saying that <a href=\"http:\/\/news.cnet.com\/8301-13505_3-9969231-16.html\" target=\"_blank\">92 percent of developers are ignoring Vista<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Sorry, this is silly. Sane Windows developers are writing apps that work on both XP and Vista. Writing an app that <strong>only<\/strong> works on Vista is equally as short-sighted as writing an app that <strong>only<\/strong> works on XP. Even WPF apps work on XP. So what are these 8% of Vista-only developers doing? Targeting DirectX 10?<\/p>\n<p>Or did they get a somewhat ambiguous questionnaire and were collectively inconsistent over which boxes they ticked?<\/p>\n<p>I agree that Vista has some problems, but this is not a useful analysis.<\/p>\n<p>Two more interesting questions would be:<\/p>\n<p>1. What proportion of developers are starting new projects that are cross-platform rather than Windows-only?<\/p>\n<p>2. What proportion of developers are starting new projects that run from the Internet with zero desktop install, or maybe just a plug-in dependency?<\/p>\n<p>There is a reason why Microsoft is fighting to establish Silverlight, and why Flex and Flash are suddenly so interesting to developers.<\/p>\n<p><div class=\"wlWriterSmartContent\" id=\"scid:0767317B-992E-4b12-91E0-4F059A8CECA8:64dc362c-318d-4551-a318-22638361a133\" style=\"padding-right: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; float: none; padding-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px; padding-top: 0px\">Technorati tags: <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/vista\" rel=\"tag\">vista<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/xp\" rel=\"tag\">xp<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/evans+data\" rel=\"tag\">evans data<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/silverlight\" rel=\"tag\">silverlight<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/flash\" rel=\"tag\">flash<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/flex\" rel=\"tag\">flex<\/a><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From Evans Data we get this statistic (email address required): Only eight percent of North American software developers are currently writing applications to run on Microsoft&#8217;s Vista operating system, while half are still writing programs for XP, according to Evans Data&#8217;s Spring 2008, North American Development Survey. These same developers forecast a fragmented Windows market &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/679-why-developers-dont-write-apps-for-vista.html\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Why developers don\u2019t write apps for Vista<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,34,55,77,80,97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adobe","category-flash","category-microsoft","category-silverlight","category-software-development","category-windows"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=679"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}