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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

Yes. My goal is also to make money as well as most other developers. Would you suggest I turn the focus of my career back to writing Win32 API based apps or WPF or UWP apps?

Where are all of these companies that are making money selling Windows apps? Where all of the jobs for Windows desktop developers?

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In the place of myth and legend: outside of SV. I know, it's crazy.

Name some companies making any substantial money selling Windows desktop apps besides Microsoft and Adobe?

Again games don't count, they aren't for the most part developing "Windows apps" they are developing apps on top of game engines.

Depends on your definition of "substantial money."

There are many, many ecosystems where a Windows desktop app is the ideal platform. I spend my days writing libraries for Windows desktop software and sharing them with many other companies in the same space.

Almost by definition, most of the companies in any particular set of domains will not be household names you've heard of. There are really very few consumer software businesses, but somehow these unknown companies manage to be pretty damn profitable, even if they're not on the scope of Microsoft or Adobe.

Still no one is giving specific examples.

I spent my first 12 years as a developer doing Windows development,cut my teeth on MFC,ATL, COM/DCOM, VB6 and later on Windows Forms with .Net.

But by mid 2008 the writing was on the wall and I had spent so much time at one company, I found that my skillset wasn't marketable. No one wanted "Windows desktop developers". They wanted web developers. I've spent last 10 years being a boring old corporate Enterprise Developer nowhere near Silicon Valley.

On my list of things that I'm focusing on these days - learning at least one modern front end web framework, learning Node JS (I'm mostly a C# developer now), become more proficient with AWS from the netops/developer/devops perspective (I'm slightly above average now), Docker, etc., Windows desktop development ranks right below learning COBOL.

Looking at the market for front end technology, why would any developer who wants to stay competitive choose to focus on Windows development over Web and mobile.

Because Web never will catch up with native, is changing into yet another VM just to try to keep up with mobile, and mobile is only a money maker when doing consulting and selling training, the apps gold rush is gone.

Windows development pays the bills, owns the tablets, laptops and desktop space outside US, and if that means being paid like COBOL consultants, even better.

Do you have any numbers to back that up? The best I can find are the Stack Overflow developer survey for what developers are actually doing....

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/

Windows software development jobs have been in decline for years...

https://www.itwriting.com/blog/9121-stackoverflow-developer-...

The head hunters that fill my inbox.

I guess with 2 021 worldwide currently open positions on LinkedIn, there is something for many of us to be busy for many years.

Classic music also has been on the decline for centuries, yet composers still sell albums.

Unless "your inbox" is publicly accessible, I don't think that counts as a citation.

Working on technologies that are declining is not where most developers want to be....

It counts as much as you throwing numbers around, regardless how much you apparently hate Windows development.

Windows owns the desktop, laptops and tablets here in Europe.

Is it declining? Sure it is, consumers are no longer replacing their computers every two years, likewise with mobile phones and tablets.

Here the market speaks pre-paid, most consumers only replace their devices when they can no longer use them.

Devices around 100 euros are still being sold with Android 5.1 on them, maybe I should say Android is also declining, as it isn't profitable to spend development effort in new versions, given the adoption rate.

Android tablets are being replaced by Windows tablets across all major consumer chainstores.

All flagship Asus and Samsung tablets are Windows 10 now, that sounds pretty much desktop Windows to me.

I have seen countless technologies come and go.

Some want to be rich selling hit-Summer tunes, while others manage a comfortable life composing classic, jazz, medieval music.

It counts as much as you throwing numbers around, regardless how much you apparently hate Windows development.

The numbers I'm "throwing around" are from reputable publicly accessible sites - unless you don't think Stack Overflow is reputable. As far as the trend being away from Windows development - I posted a quote from the CEO of Microsoft in this very thread saying as much.

I don't "hate" Windows development. I would hate being stuck on unpopular, less marketable technologies. My area of expertise is still Windows back end development and ASP.Net MVC and .Net Core with a side of AWS netops, devops, and development.

Visual Studio Team Services is a joy to use for CI/CD.

I'm not disputing that Windows "owns the desktop" but the desktop market for developers is minuscule compared to web and mobile. All the money is going away from the desktop. How much money does the average consumer spend on desktop applications outside of Microsoft and Adobe? How much of B2B software as a service revenue is being spent on desktop applications compared to web applications and mobile? What are most people doing on their tablets if not MS Office and spending time on the web? Even if you're a developer, there is little money to be made creating development tools. My entire development tool chain consists of Fred Software besides the $11 a month a pay JetBrains.

Is it declining? Sure it is, consumers are no longer replacing their computers every two years, likewise with mobile phones and tablets.

We were talking about Software sells not hardware sells why are you conflating the two? As a developers selling software, The important metric is the installed based not the replacement rate. And you keep talking about the popularity of Windows desktops, but that doesn't matter as a software developer if no one is buying desktop software - except for MS Office. People are still mostly using thier desktop computers for office productivity and to go to websites.

I have seen countless technologies come and go

So have I, I got my start programming in 65C02 assembly language on an Apple //e. But I've never been one to mourn a technology that was passed its prime. That's the reason I've been moving away from the Microsoft stack toward cloud, web, and eventually mobile.

As far as where the money is for development....

Everyone including Microsoft sees the writing on the wall.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/selling-software-where-have-al...

https://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/22/mobile-game-revenue-to-pass-...

Autodesk, Altium, Mentor Graphics, Cadence, Keysight, National Instruments, Texas Instruments, Analog Devices, Microchip, CCS, Keil, IAR, NXP, Mikroelektronika, Mitubishi, Xilinx etc.

EDA software, CAD/CAM software, instrument control software, electronic simulation and modeling software, specialized compilers/IDEs, etc. are mostly made for Windows desktops (although more and more of them are also supporting Linux nowadays).

And if you combine the revenue of all of those companies, how do they stack up?

To put it into perspective King (maker of Candy Crush) - just one mobile app developer made $2 billion in revenue last year (https://www.statista.com/statistics/288974/king-annual-reven...)

That's about the same as Autodesk (https://www.statista.com/statistics/416235/net-revenue-of-au...).

Having a dominance in a platform (Windows) with a shrinking market is not a winning formula. Why do you think Microsoft is de-emphasizing Windows?

From no less than the CEO of Microsoft.

At our core, Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world. We will reinvent productivity to empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more.

You just said games don't count.

I said games don’t count as far as a reason to care about Windows desktop dominance because “Windows” games are usually written on top of a cross platform framework that is fairly easily ported to another platform. Claiming Windows is important because of the number of Unity games that run on it is about like saying Windows is important because of the number of websites you can go to on it.

If that was that simple, we would already have the year of Linux Desktop Games, we don't and never will.

Yeah, I know about Steam on Linux, just a tiny drop of Steam on Windows.

SAP

SAP isn't "windows desktop software". This whole thread started by saying that Microsoft can leverage its Windows dominance.

SAP can either be used as web based software and even thier "Windows" Software is mostly built using thier proprietary cross platform ABAP platform.

I wasn't completely serious about SAP, just meant to gesture to the the general direction of where I see commercial windows software. There are many corporate software vendors I deal with that sell windows software, for an example a suit of Office plugins that connects to SharePoint and do documents versioning.

Another area where I see windows desktop software, and I don't see it goes anywhere soon, is in industrial, medical and labs equipment control.

Games are one of the few remaining pieces of software that require tight platform integration. And even this is changing with WebGL.

If you take games totally out of the equation, App Store profits drop substantially. Most third-party apps are games or native wrappers for web UIs (pinterest, spotify, netflix). Of those, most are free or tied to a subscription that's device independent.

Even if that's the case, that still supports my original point that Microsoft having 90% of the desktop PC market has become increasingly meaningless in the age of web and then mobile. In the grand scheme of things, few new software initiatives are targeting Windows compared to web and mobile and only a select few companies are making any real money writing desktop software.

The example given of Autodesk kind of proves my point. They have the same annual revenue making CAD software that King digital has making Candy Crush.

Games aren't tightly tied to a single mobile platform now - most of them use a cross platform game engine. The reason they won't go to the web is payments are frictionless on mobile and you don't have to trust anyone but the platform provider.

Today anyone can setup their own shopping site and probably manage their own shipping but most small merchants still sell on Amazon.

I mean, I agree with your argument -- I'm just extending it to say that no platform dominance matters in the era of the web. Any software with mass-market appeal is going to be web-based so that it can reach the largest possible audience.

Sarcasm: 'Overwhelming'

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