Interest towards LabVIEW constantly decreasing

[Grampa_of_Oliva_n_Eden]

[crelf]

[i2dx]

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.

[Tomi Maila]

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.

[Aristos Queue]

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.

[Tomi Maila]

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.

[crelf]

[Anders Björk]

[i2dx]

[Tomi Maila]

[eaolson]

[Tomi Maila]

[eaolson]

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'?

[AdamRofer]

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.

[Grampa_of_Oliva_n_Eden]

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

[Tomi Maila]

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

[Grampa_of_Oliva_n_Eden]

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

[Dave Graybeal]

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

[LAVA 1.0 Content]

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...