jeffrey hammond

Analyst: New developer demographics favor Linux, PHP

COLUMBIA, S.C.--Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer might agree with The Who that "the kids are alright," but he's unlikely to appreciate their changing taste in programming languages and operating systems. But then, neither will Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.

After all, according to at the Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond, speaking here Thursday at the 2010 Palmetto Open Source Conference, the rising generation of developers are more familiar with Ruby and PHP than Java or .Net, and increasingly opt to develop and deploy enterprise and Web applications on Linux rather than Windows or Unix.

The beginning of the … Read more

Forrester misunderstands its 'intellectual property'

The conventional wisdom is that scarcity makes a product worth buying.

Whether in software development or software analysis, the thinking goes that making your products freely available extinguishes the desire to buy it.

It's a great thought. Unfortunately, it's not true--at least, not to the extent that its proponents would like.

Take Forrester. The venerable analyst firm has decided to stop letting analysts maintain personal blogs and instead to aggregate their blogs on Forrester.com. The content will still be free and viewable by anyone.

In and of itself, this isn't particularly controversial. However, the aggregation will … Read more

Open source rising as the economy continues to fall

The market is clearly racing toward a bottom when we start looking to Monty Python for business advice and the most lucid (if profane) analysis of Google's announced open-source operating system, Chrome OS, comes from Fake Steve Jobs.

However fast we may be "racing," however, we're not there yet.

At least, not according to a survey of 200 IT executives by Computer Economics, which finds:

About 49 percent of the IT executives surveyed plan to make further budget cuts in 2009. Almost 50 percent will spend less than what is allocated in their IT operational budget. … Read more