The stigma of being a Web programmer still using Windows will increase.

The speaker is David Heinermeier Hansson. He created Ruby on Rails. The full quote is:

• Apple will continue to trounce everyone else for the preferred geek platform. The stigma of being a Web programmer still using Windows will increase.

To be honest, the stigma of being on Windows no matter your occupation will increase. Now more than ever, Mac OS X is seen as a premium computing device as much as the iPod is a premium music player.

The quote above comes from the annual SYS-CON predictions from top industry players.

It’s interesting to compare some of the predictions. Gary Cornell, founder of Apress (a company that is to Windows as O’Reilly is to Open Source technology) says:

• IE 7 will have a fast adoption curve and so Firefox will cease gaining market share.
  Sales of high powered desktop will slow.
  Apple will no longer gain market share for its desktops and will stabilize at its current meaningless level.

Interesting take, Mr Cornell. More wishful thinking rather than prediction I reckon.

Mark Hinkle of Enterprise Open Source Magazine reckons:

• Microsoft’s launch of Vista will start to prompt hardware refreshes which can be nothing but good for Apple. Apple already has momentum, Intel hardware, dropping prices and all the tumblers are becoming aligned for it to creep above its measly 5% market share. Linux desktop vendors will likely see a few defectors from the Redmond camp…

John Evdemon of Microsoft says:

• IT finally admits that there is no silver bullet. Every year I hope to see this happen and every year my hopes are crushed by buzzword-of-the-minute hype machines.

Uh John? It’s your employer who was been promising the Silver Bullet all these years. You’re an Architect at Microsoft, John, you write the software that powers the hype machine.

Bill Dudley of the Eclipse Development Journal says:

• Macs will continue their ‘thought leader’ adoption curve. This is not the year they start to penetrate the corporate IT department.

Brandon Harper of Acxiom Corp says:

• People who normally wouldn’t use Linux start to explore it and even replace Windows with it permanently.

This will be dwarfed by the number of people upgrading from Windows 98 to Windows Vista with the purchase of a new machine.

I’ve just cherry-picked the Mac-relevant its but there’s heaps more in the article. A lot on AJAX, web services, Software as a Service – it’s worth a read if you have any interest in emerging technology. All of the writers have something to contribute, apart from David Cornell.