Reading the news these days, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the End is Nigh, and no person, household, or business can be thriving in the current economic climate. Greece is going bust, the US economy is in dire straits, London is burning and full of rioters…
Strange, because looking out of the window here, while the sun is not actually shining (this is the UK! Of course its raining!) all seems to be calm, and our office is humming with activity and suppressed excitement. RunRev is on a roll, and LiveCode is very much alive, kicking, and looking forward to a bright future.
Why is this? I think there are multiple factors at work. For one thing, in hard times people are forced to be resourceful, innovate, find solutions without throwing a lot of money at the problem, and when you have a programming problem and you can’t hire a programmer, what do you do? Program it yourself of course. With LiveCode, because it is such an easy solution for people who are not traditional programmers. We are definitely seeing a rise in the number of people looking for a “roll your own” solution who might in the past have either bought expensive off the shelf solutions or hired a programmer to do the job.
Another big factor has to be the huge growth in the Mobile market. LiveCode is perfectly positioned to be your mobile solution and the numbers of people wanting to write their own mobile app is exploding exponentially. iPads are appearing everywhere – even in the cockpits of aeroplanes – and more and more people are excited about not just using them, but putting their own special app in the app store. These again are often people who do not have a programming background, but are drawn in to a brand new genre of app creation. Its almost like the early days of computers, when people were very much writing the programs they were using, rather than just consuming programs other people had written. Mobile is a new blank sheet, for the next generation to program.
Hand in hand with the growth in Mobile, is a new excitement in education. School boards, universities, individual teachers and lecturers are recognizing the need for the next generation to be equipped for the technology future. Students want to write apps. Teachers want to show them how. The traditional tools for this purpose are hard to use, boring to learn with and not engaging. We are seeing more and more sales into the education market as LiveCode is recognized as a great way to teach and engage students.
Overall, we’re pretty happy. The future’s bright. The future’s … LiveCode.
