The fall of Microsoft, in one chart

It's been a rough decade or more by Microsoft. He lost his position as the most valuable technology company in the world to his old rival of Apple, and even if Windows maintains a very important market share in the PC market is collapsing, and Microsoft is struggling to keep Apple and Google when it comes to tablets, phones and watches.

In the process, he lost a lot of ground among developers, as this painting of Joshua Kunst (through Ed Tufte) illustrates:



The table shows the most popular tags stack overflow, a forum widely used programming where users can ask and answer questions on topics coding. When the site was launched in 2008, the top five was dominated by issues related to Microsoft: the programming language C #, which Microsoft created; .NET Framework software to write applications for Microsoft Windows; and ASP.NET, .NET subset used to write web applications.

To some extent this was a result of the aid that stack overflow was in the beginning. It was started by two developers of Windows, veteran Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, and the site itself was written in C # and ASP.NET, so its first users were interested in disproportionately on these issues and subjects were bound to lose in the site gained popularity users outside the C # NET / community ..

However, the table also says something about the declining importance of the tools of Microsoft. C # was still in first place in 2011, when the site was already popular enough to be more than one million unique visitors per day, but then fell. ASP.NET and .NET have declined even more dramatically, so much so that not even the best 30 labels in 2015. In contrast, Java - long a major competitor to C # - remained at large summit partly because Google has chosen as the primary language for writing Android applications. Windows Mobile, where C # is usable, never took off, and now Android is by far the most popular mobile platform.

But the decline of Microsoft is not just about smartphones. Side web programming languages ​​that compete with C # and ASP.NET server - like PHP and Python - acquired in ASP.NET weakened.

SQL Server, the database Microsoft's flagship, has lost ground to the MySQL open source. And as more and more energy on Web development headers for the client side - where you basically have to use HTML and JavaScript - Developing server side through frameworks such as ASP.NET lost some relevance. Now, a growing number of sites are choosing to use JavaScript to the server as well. Microsoft has made some progress in this area with its machine language (a version of JavaScript with some additional features), but in general, if you are a developer, where to find Microsoft technologies is much lower in 2015 than it was in 2008.

There are some interesting trends are not from Microsoft on the table too. The statistical language R gained popularity as data analysis has become an important center for high-tech companies. XML, a markup language for recording data is very similar to HTML, it became less popular, while JSON, an alternative to the basic JavaScript, gained ground. And several JavaScript frameworks like jQuery and angularjs has seen increased interest.