In most of the world the "goal" isn't to go raise VC money. It's to develop a product and earn a living.

Maybe people building Windows apps for the massive market are doing okay without the desire to raise billions and take over the world?

This is an excellent overview from a developer point on why you don't want to develop desktop apps even if you don't want to depend on VC. This is 2009, mind you.

I said VC, but even as an architect of internal line of business enterprise apps, I would be kicked out of any managers office if I suggested developing a desktop app.

Heck these days it's hard to convince companies to write real native mobile apps instead of using one of the cross platform web based mobile app platforms.

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

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

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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-...

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.

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.

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

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.

Maybe no one in reality-distortion field of SV cares about Desktop, but offices are full of them and they're still running regular old desktop applications to do real work.

I have been developing mostly new WPF enterprise applications in the last 4 years and there is plenty of work across European business.

I'm not saying my experience is typical, but I suspect the bulk of enterprise apps are now browser rather than desktop based.

Another example is how across Europe, Windows 10 2-1 convertibles are basically wiping out Android tablets at consumer stores.

That has nothing to do with the statement that no one cares about Windows desktop development. All of the energy in the software space is web and mobile. Google wants to leverage the Android market - which dwarfs the install based of desktops to make Chrome OS more appealing. Apple just announced they are doing something similar - porting iOS frameworks to MacOS to make it easier for iOS developers to write Mac apps. No one would ever say that the Mac desktop market is vibrant.

Another example is how across Europe, Windows 10 2-1 convertibles are basically wiping out Android tablets at consumer stores.

Android tablets are horrible experiences. What are most people doing with thier desktop computers? Using the web and the same apps from the big companies - Microsoft and Adobe.

They paid software as a service companies for everything from project management, human resource related software, mobile device management, email, they had Office 365, etc.

Most new internal software is being written using web technologies. Even if they are hosting the apps themselves. They want thier employees to be able to access their bespoke apps remotely without logging into a Citrix Server.

Where are all of the mythical profitable companies making commercial desktop software? Where are all the companies making new internal line of business desktop software?

These systems are slow, unintuitive, and annoying. But they're stable. Companies don't want to risk their existence to change something that sort of works, so you'd be amazed at what a ERP solution with $X00,000 annual costs can get away with.

(In turn, they are often managed by / developed by the IBM/Oracle level of consulting b.s., which further drives up the costs.)

Isn't most of Oracle's desktop software written in Java and doesn't it run on anything that runs Java?