Confucius says: innovate
According to Stephanie Martin, the new worldwide lead for IBM Developer Relations, the number of young new IT developers is falling fast in the US, but rising fast in East Asia.
“In China what we’re seeing is interest in core technologies in the open standards area,” Martin said. “We’re seeing the most interest in learning more about Java, JavaScript and SOA as well as how all those work together. We’re also seeing interest there in Web 2.0 technology.”
Japan and Korea are also growth areas for developers; the latter apparently seeing 57% more people join IBM’s Developer Network in 2007 than in 2006. What’s interesting is that this represents collaboration between skilled and enthusiastic participants, which will hopefully means rising standards. Add this to the innovation and experimentation we’re seeing in other fields (eg the approaches to mobile phone design I wrote about recently), and it looks like we can expect to see lots more exciting developments coming out of the Confucian zone soon…
