In Australia, .NET hasn’t got any foothold ???? There’s been lots of talk in the blogosphere in relation to a recent post by Martin Fowler entitled - RubyMicrosoft . (** link fixed) I don’t want to get into the whole ” AlphaGeek s are moving away from the Microsoft platform” debate, but there is one comment by Martin that I want to respond to. Martin writes … In Australia, .NET hasn’t got any foothold at all amongst our clients. I’m not sure what to make of this data. We aren’t so big to be a statistically valid sample on our own. But it’s a useful data point nonetheless particularly since we like to think our clients are the “alpha IT shops”. Martin, Did you know the Australian Architecture Forum 2007 is on in a few weeks and Thoughtworks is a sponsor of the event Did you know ThoughtWorks is a member of Australia.NET clusters together with over 650 other companies that use .NET in Australia . The client list from Thoughtworks in Australia includes companies like AMP, ANZ bank, Coca Cola, Westpac, all with significant .NET deployments. Did you know ReMix is sold out . I’m sure there are some folks coming for a stickybeak including the Alpha Geeks. I’ll leave it there. If anyone from “alpha IT shops” in Australia have an opinion - it would be nice to hear too Technorati tags: Martin Fowler, Frank Arrigo, .NET, Thoughtworks Comments Anonymous June 12, 2007 PingBack from http://testsubdomain.netmoviehost.com/in-australia-net-hasnt-got-any-foothold/ Anonymous June 12, 2007 http://blog.projectxtech.com/2007/05/01/silverlight-is-web-20-finally-here/ Anonymous June 12, 2007 The company I work for, whilst not an “IT Shop” (whatever that means) - is a very large company, and we do use .NET, including on large projects. We’re not using a single platform though - we use different products, from different vendors, based on what was available, and the best fit at the time. We’ve definitely got more than a foothold in .NET. Primarily we use .NET for WebApps, but we also have a healthy set of .NET desktop/pda applications. Some were developed in-house, some provided by external vendors. I won’t say who I work for (I don’t speak for them, I speak from personal knowledge and experience) - but suffice to say, we’re in the top 100 companies in Australia. Anonymous June 12, 2007 Oh, and Frank - your URL for Martin’s post is wrong :) Should be http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/RubyMicrosoft.html Anonymous June 12, 2007 the link is actually http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/RubyMicrosoft.html btw Anonymous June 12, 2007 This article from Martin backs up a discussion I had with a Sydney ThoughtWorker not too long ago who mentioned that nearly 40% of US projects are in Ruby (backed up in Martin’s article I think). They also mentioned that the majority of their Australia projects are Java. In fact there was practically no work in .Net in Brisbane at all. I don’t think this is indicative of the market in general; this was Martin’s reflection of statistics relating to ThoughtWorks alone. Perhaps the real mistake in his statement was that ThoughtWorks’ clients were Alpha IT shops? As a .Net developer, its hard for me to measure the market of other languages. Anonymous June 13, 2007 Lately i’ve seen a lot of “hysterics” from the Open-Source community about Ruby and how Additional resources Last updated on 2007-06-12