Recently, anecdotal evidence has suggested to me that java's influence has been on the wane... Especially given the view in Cape Town, South Africa - South Africa has traditionally been a microsoft land, while in other countries (mostly first world), microsoft is not so strong.
However, according to Tiobe Programming Commity Index, java is the most popular programming language on the internet, not only that, but java also won the TIOBE Programming Language of 2005 award. Go Java!
Based on more anecdotal evidence is done seem as if microsoft is stronger in the developing world than in the non developing world. I do not think that the battle is between microsoft and java but between closed source proprietary and open source public domain. Open source thrives in environments where you have a high number of educated people as well as a high number of people who have the time to devote to developing open source applications. It stands to reason that if you have a high number of people developing open source applications in their spare time, those same people are going to push the adoption of open source in their day jobs, thereby increasing the popularity of open source, and thus java. It might also be true that open source requires a sufficiently large programming population in order to develop, another reason why java is probably more popular in first world countries.
You may be asking why open source does not fit with VB and C# - the answer is simple. You can't run an open source operating system and code in C#/VB. Okay, before you argue that there are IDE's where this is possible, they are not in the main stream developer market.
1 comment:
Microsoft uses money to woo third world countries into using its products. They know that people like getting things of value for free, so they give away Office and Windows to all the governments, cities, education departments and they all use Microsoft products. This hooks them in. It doesn't work for First World countries because software just isn't as expensive for these rich countries so the "free" carrot doesn't work for them.
That's my opinion anyway.
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