Most developers prefer XP over Vista
By Jonathan Schlaffer
Vista has a problem. Not a problem related to software or compatibility but a problem with developers. Developers do not like Vista and while this may change in the future it is not the current preference. Microsoft could have listened to consumers and businesses but instead decided to push Vista and it has pushed too hard.
According to Cnet, Microsoft used to be popular with the developers but not anymore and not with Vista. Only eight percent of developers are writing applications specifically for Vista. I doubt this takes into account the XP programs that work on Vista.
Assuming that eight percent just represents applications developed specifically for Vista, that doesn’t look very good. However, it could be argued that some applications written for XP are also compatible with Vista but figures would get skewed when doing so.
Developers have also complained that it is difficult to create applications specifically for Vista,
Unfortunately, that improved security posture makes it more difficult for developers to write applications for Vista (read: no more kernel-level access and UAC to worry about), and it also causes compatibility problems with older applications. Ironically, the wave of attacks targeting operating system vulnerabilities has largely passed, and today hackers have moved on to target applications. At the same time, Microsoft has provided iterative improvements in Windows XP security, bolstering its status as "good enough" and further eating into Vista’s pie.
Microsoft should just forget about Vista and make Windows 7 more like XP in its code base, or just write an entirely new operating system from scratch. That would be similar to what Apple did when it moved from the OS9 era to the Unix-based OSX era and dropped all backwards compatibility. Microsoft needs to do something similar and yes in the short term, consumers would be angry. For the long term, it’s the better answer.
At this time, I doubt it is within Microsoft’s skill set to create ANYTHING from scratch as it just likes buying up other companies and passing off those products as its own.
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June 18th, 2008
Microsoft is not at 2% marketshare with 1 product like Apple was with OSX. Whatever they do has to work with a huge number of their other products. There are billions of dollars of software support money here.
In retrospect it would have been best for all concerned if the Justice department had busted them into pieces with a separate company for Windows. The code is now so commingled it’s almost impossible to start from scratch. They’d need to run separate tracks on much of their product line.