There is plenty of money to be done doing desktop software, in fact that is what I have done the past five years, before switching employer.
How fast do you think a startup founder would get laughed out of an investor’s office of he started his pitch with “I have this great idea for a Windows Application”?
On the development side, it would be crazy for any developer to tie their horse to .Net Framework when MS has publicly said that it is in maintenance mode.
There were still a few jobs for Windows CE developers as late as 2014 even though MS abandoned it after VS 2008 (2007?). It would have been foolish for me to take such a job.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ADSK/autodesk/net-...
And MathWorks revenue is about a billion.
Compare that to even your middling SAAS company. I’m only saying that it is silly for someone to invest their future employability on a platform (desktop Windows) and a runtime (.Net Framework) that even MS is moving away from. Everything they announce is about Azure, .Net Core, and heck even Android these days. I’m not even saying that Windows as a server OS is the worse thing in the world - even though it’s a lot cheaper in both licensing costs and resources to use Linux even if you use .Net Core.
And a big bunch of Fortune 500 buying consulting for internal applications.
So if you want names just pick random companies from Fortune 500 list, whose main business is completely unrelated to selling software packages.
And again, .NET Framework and .NET Core, are as we say in Portugal, sand out of the same bag, .NET.
Finally, Azure runs on Hyper-V, not Linux.
As far as Azure running on Hyper V and not Linux, that’s irrelevant since developers of Azure are running in Linux VMs more than Windows VMs.
They don't care for one second, we keep getting greenfield projects with deployment requests on top of 4.7.2. And brownfield projects still using 4.5.
For them even having the possibility to migrate to 4.8 would be a dream come true, let alone something like .NET Core.
So no matter what Microsoft wants to push, they have to keep these guys happy.
And you’re in Europe, do you really have an on the ground pulse of what most Fortune 500 American companies are doing? I’m frequently looking at the job boards and most greenfield projects are (unfortunately it’s my favorite language) not focused on C#/.Net at all and those that are trying to get from under both Windows licensing and the increased resources requirements and are moving toward .Net Core.
There are still holdouts for VB6 and I still see jobs wanting people to maintain them. But would you say maintaining legacy VB6 code was a good career move?
As for VB 6, if they pay alright and offer nice remoting package, why not.
Actually I did a couple of VB.NET (.NET 4.5) support activities during last year.
See, most people around this side of the pound aren't career obsessed.
We get to work, enjoy our IT unions (in some countries), 30 day vacations and have a life outside job.
As long as it pays the bills, most people are happy with what they get.
The last thing I want is to be tied to a company because I am not competitive in the market and then start complaining about “ageism”
And I’m on the opposite side of the country from the west coast FAANG and startup culture. I’m the definition of a standard “enterprise developer”.