05/05/2008

Software developers active in Web 2.0 development ranked Microsoft’s MSN/Live Windows Developer Program higher than developer programs offered by Google, eBay, Yahoo, Facebook, or PayPal in the 2008 Evans Data Corp. Web 2.0 Developer Programs Users’ Choice survey conducted in March of this year.

ebizQ received the following:

Only users of each developer site rated the corresponding developer program, which saw Microsoft’s site edging past Google’s in developer user satisfaction. The seven leading Web 2.0 sites were rated by their program users across 13 different developer program categories, including API functionality, blogs, marketing assistance, documentation, forums, ongoing communications/RSS, support, tools/SDKs, and Web Services.

“Microsoft has devoted a lot of effort to enhancing the MSN/Live Windows program over the last year,” said John Andrews, president and CEO of Evans Data Corp. “And those efforts have paid off in a decidedly higher level of user satisfaction than we saw last year. Google, as well as eBay, Yahoo! and others have several areas of strength for developers, but Microsoft has much more experience in developer programs and it shows. Cultivating a development community is strategic as Web 2.0 moves from consumer-facing social applications to a business-to-business strategy for many companies.”

Evans Data provides its Users’ Choice reports to the IT community free of charge as a public service. Users’ Choice reports cover several areas of satisfaction and interest to developers and IT managers, such as IDEs, application lifecycle and source control management, application servers, scripting languages and more.