a.k.a. the advent of Donnie Berkholz
Finally, here’s part 4 on the RedMonk approach to industry analysis [part 1, part 2, part 3]. Again, I hope it’s useful to you, friendly reader, as well as the upcoming additions to the RedMonk team.
2011
- “How important is software? Generational differences between software producers” on the transformation in business models depending on when companies were founded, be it hardware, software, services, or data (follow-up on the Age of Data).
- “The Rails/Node lesson: frameworks lead adoption” on how growth of a programming language is a function of framework popularity.
- “You are who you build for” on companies selling to those compatible with their own corporate culture and the need to sell to individual employees (follow-up one year later on enterprise vs consumer software).
- “Napster: lessons for the enemies of shadow IT” on embracing and centralizing shadow IT rather than fighting it.
2012
- “Microsoft Surface and the future of software” on the resurgence of integration between software and hardware.
- “The importance of software at Oracle” and “The end of software: Microsoft posts a loss for the first time ever” on the shrinking business of software licensing.
- “IaaS pricing patterns and trends” on using data to determine where vendors are attempting to differentiate.
- “On APIs and copyright” on vendors’ ability to use assumptive API capture to strangle competition.
- “Data science, Gangnam style” on bringing modern collaboration a la open source and GitHub to a new arena.
- “Free hardware and the rise of Android” on the surprising power of giveaways in generating ecosystems.
- “What can data scientists learn from DevOps?” on the need for codifying repetitive work (in actual software code) and applying agile outside of software development alone.
- “AWS, Y Combinator and the startup boom” on the importance of incubators and the cloud to lowering the cost of startups and horizontal scaling of funding.
- “On recent IBM, SAP and Adobe conferences. Developers developers developers … marketers?” and “Developers OR marketers? Nah, developers ARE marketers” on the role of developers in championing technologies internally and externally.
- “On package management: negating the downsides of bundling” on the benefits and challenges of packaging.
- “Windows 8: everyone is a consumer and a creator, but developers will universally drive adoption” on the importance of a heterogeneous approach to technology.
2013
- “Interest withering in Java application servers” on the trend toward composability over monoliths.
- “Quantifying the shift toward permissive licensing” on the move toward commercializable open source.
- “GitHub will hit 5 million users within a year” on the use of true data science in our analysis.
- “DevOps and cloud: a view from outside the Bay Area bubble” on the divide between early adopters and the rest of the world.
- “Conway’s law but for software: Salesforce and SAP” on the importance of corporate context in opportunities to innovate.
- “VMworld: the pundits versus the practitioners” on the difference between users’ pragmatism vs pundits’ visionary looks into the hazy future.
2014
- “A swing of the pendulum: are fragmentation’s days numbered?” and “Microservices and the migrating Unix philosophy” on the shifts in fragmentation over time.
- “IT must become a service provider, or die” on the changing needs of IT shops to provide good CX for their internal customers.
You may notice a heavy bias toward my posts in the past couple of years. That’s largely because, while my colleagues have published very important work, enough of it follows from their earlier philosophical foundations that it doesn’t require mention in a post on approaches rather than greatest hits. However, I was still developing my approach to analysis, so I included my key approaches here.
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