Grampa_of_Oliva_n_Eden Posted April 9, 2007 Report Share Posted April 9, 2007 QUOTE(Tomi Maila @ Apr 8 2007, 04:07 AM) Have you been taking a look at what Google Trends says about LabVIEW? Google Trends is a Google Labs tool that allows you to see the search volumes of certain search terms over time. The surprising result is that according to Google Trends the interest towards labview is declining and the search volumes are decresing. The decline rate is not much but it is still there. And no matter what kind of error marigins you use it the search volume definitely is not increasing. Is LabVIEW going to fade away? Take a look by yourself. p.s. Unluckily there is not enough search volume to see how LAVA is doing in search volumes not to mention my new blog at expressionflow.com. I do not kow if that indicates anything good or bad about LV. Searching for "Toilet paper", "sex" and "beer" gives similar curves. Should I interpret that as indicating those items are becoming less popular? Ben Quote Link to comment
crelf Posted April 9, 2007 Report Share Posted April 9, 2007 QUOTE(Ben @ Apr 8 2007, 10:42 PM) Searching for "Toilet paper", "sex" and "beer" gives similar curves. Should I interpret that as indicating those items are becoming less popular? "Toilet Paper" I can understand (sure, most of us use it thus it's popular, but not that may of us are interested in it) "sex" has probably been replaced by "porn" (that search term is on the "rise") "beer" has a huge interested following - not so much to learn more about it, but more to sample it "As a Google Labs product, it is still in the early stages of development. Also, it is based upon just a portion of our searches, and several approximations are used when computing your results. Please keep this in mind when using it." It's not about popularity, it's about interest (and, AFAIK, limited only to those searching a particular term alone, and only a portion of the searches at that). For example, searching for "LabVIEW" might be reflected in the results (remember, it's based on only a portion of the searches), but searching for "LabVIEW DAQ" won't. It may be indicative, but that's about it. Personally (here's the scientist in me ) I'd like to know what the values and units are on the Y axis. Quote Link to comment
i2dx Posted April 9, 2007 Report Share Posted April 9, 2007 I would not see any problem with this. LabVIEW is a hightech product, and mankind needs hightech products to master the coming challenges (global warming, etc) without a dramatic decrease in life standard. Whithout hightech we will soon have to grow our own potatoes in our garden again (what will probably be a problem in the 71. floor in NCY ... ), and that will be much more uncomfortable than working in an air-conditioned office, staring on a computer display, the whole day - so nobody wants that. Even though I don't like to sound like an NI Sales Engineer: LabVIEW is deeply enrooted in many different industries, even so if *interest* on google decreases, it's no indicator for me that the interest in LabVIEW itself decreases. Google does not know everything - at least I hope so Even against *this trend* I'd like to predict a bright future for all engineers, who have knowhow in technology and software. Quote Link to comment
Tomi Maila Posted April 9, 2007 Report Share Posted April 9, 2007 My initial message was provocative for purpose. Many of use have been having a vision that in the future LabVIEW will have much stronger position as a programming language integrating hardware and software. I myself have thought this way as well. For me it was surprising to see that in fact the interest towards LabVIEW hasn't been increasing for the last years. I honestly thought LabVIEW is slowly gaining popularity. It however seems that this is not the case, at least not in the general public. There may be some niche groups among which the popularity is raising but it's not raising amongst the general public. I don't now speculate about the reason. What I'd like to speculate however if this declining trend will become steeper. We all know that Java virtual machine is already running on a large platform base and the number of supported platforms is constantly increasing. The number of programming languages that can be compiled to Java Virtual Machine is rapidly increasing. JVM and Microsoft CLR have become defacto standard platforms that can execute on a huge number of different physical platforms. It's only matter of time until this trend of using virtual machine to abstract hardware layer will also reach the market of real-time platforms unless in already has. The beauty if JVM other virtual machine execution environments is that anybody can write a programming language and as long as it compiles to JVM or any other virtual machine, it works everywhere. This will be a huge challenge to LabVIEW whose major advantage has been platform compatibility and ability to use the same too for different hardware platforms and for different phases of the process. The ability to use any other suitable language on any other platform via virtual machine abstraction will be a challenge that will bite NI LabVIEW market sooner or later. It's interesting to see how NI can reply to this challenge. Will they be the owner of the number of real-time virtual machine that anybody can compile to and that runs on every platform? I certainly hope so but I'm afraid it's not going to be the case. Quote Link to comment
Aristos Queue Posted April 9, 2007 Report Share Posted April 9, 2007 Perhaps LAVA and NI.com are to blame (credit)? If the information about LV is becoming more centralized, such that people know where to go to find help, then they're not using the search engine as often. They simply visit the site. I don't know for sure, but I don't think that NI.com doesn't use google for its internal search, so any searches going on there wouldn't show up in the trends. LAVA does use google for its internal search, but that's a recent change. Anyone who has heard of LV through other sources and decides to look it up might already be armed with "ni.com" -- it is one of the very few two letter domain names, and easy to remember. QUOTE(Tomi Maila @ Apr 8 2007, 10:43 AM) I honestly thought LabVIEW is slowly gaining popularity. It however seems that this is not the case, at least not in the general public. Again, I don't think I'd draw too many conclusions from the google numbers. LV sales are increasing steadily the last several years, not just raw numbers but also percent of market share, and number of industries with interest in LV. It is popping up all over universities, guaranteeing that the next generation of engineers/scientists are going to have trained on our tool. I don't know what creates the trend on google, but I can say with confidence that interest in LV is definitely growing, and growing very well. Here's an interesting set of graphs to compare. Search terms are LabVIEW, National Instruments, dataflow, NXT, Mindstorms And, whoa, NI is doing pretty good to have LV trending so well considering this graph. Terms "programming", C++, and JAVA are all trending down very heavily, much worse than LV. My final conclusion -- this tool is still *very* much in beta, and I'm not sure its data means much at the moment. Quote Link to comment
Tomi Maila Posted April 9, 2007 Report Share Posted April 9, 2007 QUOTE(Aristos Queue @ Apr 8 2007, 07:17 PM) Anyone who has heard of LV through other sources and decides to look it up might already be armed with "ni.com" -- it is one of the very few two letter domain names, and easy to remember. I doubt this, I think National Instruments and ni.com web site are globally less well known than LabVIEW. This is also indicated by the search volumes, the one for LabVIEW is much higher than the one for National Instruments. QUOTE(Aristos Queue @ Apr 8 2007, 07:17 PM) And, whoa, NI is doing pretty good to have LV trending so well considering this graph. Terms "programming", C++, and JAVA are all trending down very heavily, much worse than LV. It's generally known fact that Java and C++ are declining languages, they already are old-fashioned even though it may sound weird in LabVIEW world where OOP was just introduced. Time has passed Java and C++. Microsoft .NET environment (C# etc) has been biting both C++ and JAVA popularity on enterprise applications. New languages similar to Ruby and Scala will eventually overtake Java in web applications unless Java is modified towards the direction of these languages. QUOTE(Aristos Queue @ Apr 8 2007, 07:17 PM) My final conclusion -- this tool is still *very* much in beta, and I'm not sure its data means much at the moment. I agree with this. I would be interested to find out if these results are manipulated somehow for example to normalize google popularity gain out of the results. Such modifications could affect the trends. On the other hand if they are not normalized, then again the trends will be dependent on google popularity changes and changes in the overall internet usage among the target group of LabVIEW users. QUOTE(Aristos Queue @ Apr 8 2007, 07:17 PM) Here's an interesting set of graphs to compare. Search terms are LabVIEW, National Instruments, dataflow, NXT, Mindstorms You forgot expressionflow. Quote Link to comment
crelf Posted April 9, 2007 Report Share Posted April 9, 2007 QUOTE(Aristos Queue @ Apr 9 2007, 02:17 AM) ...I'm not sure its data means much at the moment. If anything at all. There's not enough supporting information to indicate that the data presented means anything. It's like saying "9 out of 10 dentists prefer ACME-brand toothpaste" - it's misinformed at best, misleading at worst. Give GoogleLabs some more time - they'll either fix it up and release it, or leave it in the Labs section forever (actually, it's been in the Labs section for a looooong time already...) Quote Link to comment
Anders Björk Posted April 10, 2007 Report Share Posted April 10, 2007 It seems like all major programming languages decline.... So it is not Labview specific... Quote Link to comment
i2dx Posted April 10, 2007 Report Share Posted April 10, 2007 QUOTE(Tomi Maila @ Apr 8 2007, 07:54 PM) You forgot http://expressionflow.com' target="_blank">expressionflow. ah, you just wanted to plug your blog? <SCNR> Quote Link to comment
Tomi Maila Posted April 10, 2007 Report Share Posted April 10, 2007 QUOTE(i2dx @ Apr 9 2007, 09:16 AM) ah, you just wanted to plug your blog? <SCNR> Quote Link to comment
eaolson Posted April 10, 2007 Report Share Posted April 10, 2007 QUOTE(Tomi Maila @ Apr 8 2007, 03:07 AM) Is LabVIEW going to fade away? http://www.google.com/trends?q=labview&date=all&geo=all&ctab=0&sa=N' target="_blank">Take a look by yourself. For some reason, I am amused that the #1 city for LabVIEW and National Instruments searches is Austin, TX. Quote Link to comment
Tomi Maila Posted April 10, 2007 Report Share Posted April 10, 2007 QUOTE(eaolson @ Apr 9 2007, 05:18 PM) For some reason, I am amused that the #1 city for LabVIEW and National Instruments searches is Austin, TX. Those are normalized results describing the propotionality of numer of searches per amount of people. Quote Link to comment
eaolson Posted April 10, 2007 Report Share Posted April 10, 2007 QUOTE(Tomi Maila @ Apr 9 2007, 11:39 AM) Those are normalized results describing the propotionality of numer of searches per amount of people. Oh, I realize that. And I'm sure it's no coincidence that NI is headquartered in Austin. I just thought it was interesting that no other US cities were listed. So I'm wondering, is Austin in particular a hotbed of LabVIEW development, or are the NI folks themselves doing a whole lot of Googlin'? Quote Link to comment
AdamRofer Posted April 10, 2007 Report Share Posted April 10, 2007 I know the licensing included in LabVIEW 8.0 and beyond has been a show-stopper for some customers. LabVIEW 7 on a computer with the NILM installed seems to be slower, although I don't have any benchmarks to back this up at hand. Quote Link to comment
Grampa_of_Oliva_n_Eden Posted April 10, 2007 Author Report Share Posted April 10, 2007 QUOTE(eaolson @ Apr 9 2007, 02:16 PM) Oh, I realize that. And I'm sure it's no coincidence that NI is headquartered in Austin. I just thought it was interesting that no other US cities were listed. So I'm wondering, is Austin in particular a hotbed of LabVIEW development, or are the NI folks themselves doing a whole lot of Googlin'? Funny! On more than one occation, I have sensed that support was Googling the answers. Ben Quote Link to comment
Tomi Maila Posted April 10, 2007 Report Share Posted April 10, 2007 QUOTE(Ben @ Apr 9 2007, 09:27 PM) On more than one occation, I have sensed that support was Googling the answers. Perhaps the trend is declining as LabVIEW is getting more stable and NI AEs don't need to google that many answers Quote Link to comment
Grampa_of_Oliva_n_Eden Posted April 10, 2007 Author Report Share Posted April 10, 2007 QUOTE(Tomi Maila @ Apr 9 2007, 02:46 PM) Perhaps the trend is declining as LabVIEW is getting more stable and NI AEs don't need to google that many answers Where is are the stars when you need them? TO you! Ben Quote Link to comment
Dave Graybeal Posted April 11, 2007 Report Share Posted April 11, 2007 My guess is that the Declining Interest in LabVIEW from Googles perspective is that after doing 1 search you find LAVA. After finding LAVA you realize that there isn't much need in going back to Google to try to find more relevent information about LabVIEW. LAVA, Your 1 Stop Shop for LabVIEW! or LAVA... Once you Start, you Can't Stop! Dave Quote Link to comment
LAVA 1.0 Content Posted April 11, 2007 Report Share Posted April 11, 2007 QUOTE(Tomi Maila @ Apr 8 2007, 10:07 AM) Is LabVIEW going to fade away? Take a look by yourself. Now take a look at this... Quote Link to comment
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