Much manufacturing and warehouse software is on Windows, with extremely high end costs. ERPs, some are moving to the cloud but so much is still hosted locally. With HUGE annual license fees (often in the millions per year).

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.)

How much of the software that is hosted locally is web based software? My point is not that everyone is moving to the cloud, my point is how many new initiatives are being targeted at the "windows desktop"? Microsoft's only leverage was customers dependence on Windows APIs and fat client Windows Software.

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

But to answer the parent poster's question, if you were developing a new piece of manufacturing/warehouse solution, would you write it as a native windows app or would you target web or mobile? Is the claim that manufacturing/warehouse software is and will be on windows... forever?

Of course they wouldn't. They would either do it on the web or mobile. My first .Net job was writing Windows mobile apps for field technicians and factory workers on ruggedized devices. I've since written software for field service workers for Android tablets. They definitely weren't going to be carrying around Windows laptops.