Gartner Says Application Development Is a $9 Billion Industry

CowboyRobot writes "Although not as lucrative as video games or movies, Gartner projects the software application development industry will pass the US$9 Billion mark this year. They credit 'evolving software delivery models, new development methodologies, emerging mobile application development, and open source software.' Also in the report is a projection that 'mobile application development projects targeting smartphones and tablets will outnumber native PC projects by a ratio of 4:1 by 2015.'"

Is that all?

[viperidaenz]

My backwater country spends hundreds of millions every year on enterprise software development (which is guess is a part of application development?).With only $145M GDP and 4.4M people, how can we be a significant (significant being measured in %, not ppm) part of the worldwide market?

What is "application development"...?

[Half-pint HAL]

Nothing in the article makes a solid distinction between "video games" and "application software", and there's a danger that the bundling of games into "app stores" such as Apple's clouds the figures. The phrase "emerging mobile application development" kind of makes me worried here. Certainly app stores like big headline figures, so their reporting won't always make that distinction, and a lot of leisure software isn't really "games".

Really ... Gartner?!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is Gartner: "saying what we're paid to say for over 20 years." Why is anything they say on slashdot?

FB

[udachny]

So some silly agency says: 9 Billion is what the software applications market is worth (for the year 2012), and FB was 'valued' at 100 billion or so. What a fucking ridiculous joke these planned economies are, the price discovery mechanism is so broken right now because of all the government interventions into the economies of the world. How can anybody know what prices are right now, with all this money being printed.

9 Billion? How much of that is inflation, how much of that is efficiencies, how much of that is government contracts, how much of that is new platforms, what is this? If you read that 'article' you will see NOTHING.

There is nothing there.