While we as marketers often perceive the Web and mobile markets as somewhat mature, our recent Developer Media Tech Trends study shows that there is still a lot of market opportunity and interest. Here’s why.
As technology marketers, and as people who spend our time immersed in the development market, we spend a lot of time on the leading edge of the market. It might not always seem that way, but we do! It’s a fascinating paradox in this market that while our customers — software developers — must spend a lot of time maintaining existing projects, line of business (LOB) software, and legacy systems, they are also one of the most forward-looking markets in the world. We know this instinctively because we’ve all seen it: developers are driven to understand, experience and master new technologies. They’re motivated to do so because of not only their desire for job security but also because it’s part of their personalities. (Our recent developer personality study reinforced this observation.)
Because developers are so forward-thinking, it’s easy for all of us to get caught in thinking only about what’s coming on the horizon and what the next cool technology trend will be. There’s nothing wrong with that. But we can’t lose our perspective.
So while we’re looking for the next cool thing, it’s easy for us to think about mobile and Web technologies being old news. But they are not. They are far from it.
That’s what we found in our recent Developer Media Tech Trends study we released a couple of weeks ago: Web and mobile technologies still show significant growth, and we feel this growth shows no signs of slowing. Even though these are established technology categories, there is still interest, growth and opportunity for marketers.
For example, in our survey we found three Web technologies showed an impressive 28% growth over 2013’s survey: CSS, HTML and node.js. Just behind these were JavaScript, jQuery and Python. Objective C, a language used almost exclusively for iOS apps, showed almost 21% growth. We’ll talk about mobile platform growth in another post, but in short, every mobile platform showed at least 25% growth in developer use/interest.
Our advice: find your customers’ (and potential customers’) pain around Web and mobile development. Address it. Harness this ongoing and significant interest in Web and mobile technologies to provide real solutions and you can thrive.