Windows Vista: There Will Be Dud

“Microsoft’s philosophy is to ‘do things better’,” Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said at the D6 conference last month. “And Vista has given us lots of opportunity to do that.”

Yes, Microsoft (MSFT) certainly has done just that. Actually, even more than you’d think, because as it turns out, the Chronic Vista Aversion Disorder that swept through the consumer population following Vista’s launch has also afflicted the developer community.

According to recent research from Evans Data, fewer than one in 10 software developers are writing applications specifically for Windows Vista this year (almost half are still writing applications for XP and presumably the .Net framework). And that means applications that leverage Vista features that would prevent them from running on XP without modification.

Evans expects that percentage to improve a bit next year, but not by much. The research firm found that about 24% of developers plan to tailor their apps to use Vista-specific features in 2009. Course, by that time, they may not even have to bother. Windows 7 will arrive at market by late 2009, early 2010.

[Illustration: LolCatGenerator.com]