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Survey: Developers Not Jumping on Vista Bandwagon

Evans Data research indicates only eight percent of developers in North America are writing applications for Vista, even though the OS has been live for 15 months.

• By Becky Nagel
• 05/15/2008

The study also states that while development for Vista is expected to rise to 24 percent in 2009, it will continue to lag behind Windows XP development, with 29 percent of those surveyed expecting to continue to create apps for the previous-generation operating system.

Overall, 69 percent of developers said they expect to develop for Windows in 2009, and 15 percent for Linux, according to a summary of the report released to journalists.

Evans Data's President and CEO John Andrews said that the results show developers have a "wait-and-see approach" when it comes to Vista.

"The new operating system has had more than its share of problems and the desire to move from XP...is still lagging," he commented in a prepared statement. "That coupled with interest in alternative operating systems is suppressing development activity and that in turn will further erode Vista's acceptance."

In terms of development tools, the company says its survey showed that Visual Studio Team System's "usage rate" is lagging behind IBM's Rational Suite and Subversion. From a development methodology standpoint, two-thirds of corporate developers are expected to use agile development techniques (up from "more than half" currently). Evans Data did not disclose further details on either of these two findings.