Thursday, July 12, 2007

Stupid conclusions using google trends


This whole thing started because of a project I had to integrate with Oracle BPM. Well, If you search for Oracle BPM, there is only the standard marketing stuff and no technical article, which is weird.

There are three kind of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics - Benjamin Disraeli

That (and an idle Friday afternoon) was what got this started. With so much hype about SOA (coining such awesome terms like "an SOA" by people without anything better to do) I decided to separate Signal from Noise launching some BPM-related queries to Google Trends.

Any product adoption curve has an S-shaped form, which means that by now (the market starting and the products anything but mature yet) the BPM graph should be rising. Instead, you get a flat line:



Ouch. The tools are buggy, there is close to none documented success stories or best practices, and there seems to be the same interest today than two years ago - in fact, a little LESS (considering actual people searching instead of news coverage).

The next natural question is how well the major application servers are doing these days. Even with all the buzz about spring and lightweight and the no-more-EJBs-thank-you trend, I wasn't expecting this:



Re-ouch. It seems that glassfish is a good product with bad timing, since any other provider is ramming downhill. As an interesting side note, glassfish may be the only server that is not used by India, India, India, Japan, and India (to see the detailed localized stats, use the combo box at the bottom of the page, named "rank by")

Being such a JSF lover, I really believe that no stupid conclusions list would be complete without a web framework survey:



Somewhere between 2005 and 2006, We The Crowd must have noticed that life with JSF sucked big time. The JSF top is still monopolized by India, which may imply that it's the outsourcing technology of choice or not mean anything at all.

At this point I started searching for Really Funny Stuff, since that is what Fridays are for. If you feel curious about the relationship between Windows Vista and a regular souffle:



Which has a curious resemblance with sex, something that sounds logical if you care about how much Microsoft is charging for Vista.

That was all about my Friday. Do you have any other query to launch? Alcoholic beverages? God vs Sex? Go ahead and share!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice charts! Give GlassFish a bit more time... GFv2 is not yet out and that is the fist one with clustering, failover and the such. We hope the larger adoption will follow GFv3, when we will have modularity and a solution competitive with Tomcat. - eduard/o

dahernan said...

Oracle BPM sux. I hope this comment takes a part of trends :D

Anonymous said...

What one should really miss using this amazing tool is the built-in comparation with old-good "Joint Strike Fighter" project ;) (That's why the correlation with Umberto Eco's floral stall from Le pendule de Foucault remains not clearly illustrated.)

netvor said...

Try "spring, winter, summer, autumn" in Google Trends... a proof that people really hate autumn ;)

Peter Thomas said...

Hey I just came across this and thanks! Now I have a link in response to all those oh-so-stupid slides I see in some so-called web framework "smackdown" comparisons...

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