On Wednesday, 1 November 2017 at 19:49:04 UTC, Joakim wrote:
As for saying Windows is dying, that is a factual examination of the data
When you say it is dying, I (and perhaps most others) would assume the argument you are making is that not only is Windows in decline, but also that it is about to no longer exist as a meaningful platform for programmers to code on.
This is a forecast about the future. However, the future is inherently un-knowable. Forecasts are opinions. While these forecasts may be based on facts and people could disagree about the likelihood of the forecast or their confidence in the forecast, it is opinion. It is not fact.
I wouldn't dispute that Windows is in decline. I looked up the stack overflow survey of platforms that people program on and added up the Windows components from 2013 to 2016. In 2013 it was 60.4% and steadily fell to 52.2% in 2016. The largest growth of the share was OS X (not Linux). However, even falling from 60% to 50%, it's still 50%. That's huge. And this is programmers who use Stack Overflow, not normal users. Look at the developer environment and its either Visual Studio or a text editor (Sublime or Notepad++) as most popular.
The evidence says it is in decline. And the trend doesn't look good. However, that doesn't mean it's going away. It also doesn't mean you can project the current trend into the future at the current rate or at a faster or slower rate. Who knows what the rate could be. What matters is that half of all developers (by this measure) use Windows now. Who knows what the equilibrium will be? Maybe it will stabilize at roughly equal shares across shares across Linux/OSX/Windows. Maybe Windows will become niche (in which case you could conceivably make the argument that it's dying). God only knows. But you cannot say that it is all fact and not opinion.
It is opinion. It is a forecast. [1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2016
