The 90 / 90 Rule

Over the next five years state and local governments will lead the push toward open source software, according to an analysis conducted by market research firm Government Insight. The report estimates a 30% compound annual growth rate in open source software spending through 2009.

Combine this trend with the shift toward Internet-based software (Software as a Service) in the form of Web applications and the future looks bright for Web designers with "back-end" programming and database skills.

Let's look at the data. According to Netcraft's July 2006 Web Server Survey, Open-source Apache Web server hosts approximately 60% of the world's web sites. Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) hosts approximately 30%. And Microsoft has experienced a resurgence in the past six months capturing market share from Apache. This growth spurt corresponds to Microsoft's release of Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0.

The practical implications are the following:

• Web developers in the government, not-for-profit and small business sectors should position themselves for future growth by investing training time in learning "LAMP stack" technologies (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)
• Web developers in the large-company, for-profit world should consider developing Microsoft-specific Web application technology skills centered on ASP.NET and SQL Server

Here's the 90 / 90 Rule:

"Ninety percent of the world's 90 million websites are hosted on two technology platforms: Apache and Microsoft."

Implication:

Web developers proficient in open source (PHP & MySQL) and proprietary (ASP.NET and SQL Server) technologies will be best positioned for career security for the remainder of the decade.