How to measure enterprise software market share?

I often hear from fellow programmers something like "enterprise software is 90% programmers do, nothing else really matters". Is it any statistic sources that can show approximate, relative number of programmers working in such areas as "enterprise software" (business automation), "game development", "driver development", "end user software developme开发者_如何学JAVAnt" etc? I feel that 90% is too high to be true, but i don't know what information sources can be relevant for such question. Maybe no one cares about such statistics?

icanhasserver pointed out that you should "Never trust any statistics that you didn't forge yourself." This can answer your question in two ways.

First, it’s a way to reformulate the statistics that people quote:

“what I understand as enterprise software is 90% people I know and consider programmers do most of the time, nothing else really matters".

In itself it is a statistic, the methodology is awful and probably not representative but that may be enough to make the point of the argument. Or to make them shut up you could ask them about their methodologies.

Any statistics you would find about this topic will probably have the some kind of definition problems. Who do you consider a programmer? Is someone who uses an if function in a spreadsheet a programmer? Does it depend on your job title (are statisticians who use R programmers)? How do you tag the kind of programming, does it depend on the firm you work with? Depending on the choices you make you will have very different answers.

This brings me to the second way icanhasserver might answer your question. Who would be interested to forge the same statistics you are interested with and have the money to do it? Governments are not interested in data that detailed, you can probably forget it.

The only people who might be interested in the data and have some statistics might be the placement agencies (monster.com, for instance). The job posting might reflect well what the market is, and give an implicit definition of programmer. After a (very) quick search I did not find anything, but I hope you could be luckier.

Perhaps you could generate your own statistics by analyzing the stack overflow data dump and track the number of posts which are "enterprise" related vs. those that aren't (and maybe filtering by which ones seem "professional" vs "hobbyist")?

Of course, the trick is, for a given post, how do you decide if it's "enterprise related" or not...

I am sure about you will never get an accurate result, not even a reliable estimation about the market share, as the market is too diffuse.

A nice try could be to collect several different feeds about new software releases, and make a database from it (with differenct software categories and project sizes). Of course you will still not know how many programmers work on a project, how many workhours were counted, and will not know about apps not released on the monitored channels.

Good starting points could be (the urls point to the news):

• sourceforge
• launchpad
• google code
• github

Another pitfall is that only opensource projects are listed above :(

Good luck!

When I used to work for a large credit union that could afford to pay for its market research, we used to buy this sort of stuff from Gartner group.

Depending on the purpose you want the data for, you could assign the question to a market research institution. They will probably call a representative subset of all companies and try to find out some facts for you.

However, they will want you to pay for their expenses and time...

The upside would be a reliable number that your fellow programmers are not going to argue :-)