So now I'm thinking the main problem is that it's hard to compete with open source. There are just so many good-enough open source programming tools out there. Commercial tools not only have to better than the open source stuff, they have to be way better. This is because of all the costs involved with adopting a new IDE: Not just the price of the software, but the time spent learning a new environment and getting it configured right are significant time investments.
So open source eats away at the margins of commercial tools, which leads to less people working on commercial tools, which drives more people to the open source incumbents, etc.
I believe pg says open source is bad at design. That seems right to me. Open source is good at copying existing tools, but not so good at innovating. So we end up at a local maxima where all programming tools are decent, but not great.
"Graphic designers held about 286,100 jobs in 2008."
http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos090.htm
"Computer software engineers and computer programmers held about 1.3 million jobs in 2008."
http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos303.htm
So now I'm thinking the main problem is that it's hard to compete with open source. There are just so many good-enough open source programming tools out there. Commercial tools not only have to better than the open source stuff, they have to be way better. This is because of all the costs involved with adopting a new IDE: Not just the price of the software, but the time spent learning a new environment and getting it configured right are significant time investments.
So open source eats away at the margins of commercial tools, which leads to less people working on commercial tools, which drives more people to the open source incumbents, etc.
I believe pg says open source is bad at design. That seems right to me. Open source is good at copying existing tools, but not so good at innovating. So we end up at a local maxima where all programming tools are decent, but not great.