Developers hacked off with Windows

The survey shows that while Windows is still the dominant operating system of choice for developers, the number targeting Windows for their applications declined about 10 percent from a year ago.

In 2007, 74 per cent of developers wrote Windows applications while this year the figure had fallen to 64.8 per cent targeted the platform as opposed to in 2006.

Infoworld quotes John Andrews, the CEO of Evans Data, as saying that the decline was due to increase in developers beginning to target Linux and different Linux distributions. Novell and Red Hat were the two dominant ones.

He thought that Vista probably offset some of the decline and the figures would otherwise been much worse.

The share for Windows is expected to drop another two percent, to about 63 per cent, in the next year, Andrews said.

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