The slow evolution of enterprise tech

Every so often, we’re duped into thinking that enterprise technology changes quickly; that if you don’t jump on this or that hype train right now you’re going to get left behind. A decade ago it was cloud computing. Today it’s generative AI. Each promised to change everything. Yet today, despite AWS on a $100 billion revenue run rate and the cloud permeating enterprise IT, the vast majority of enterprise IT spending (90% or so) remains doggedly on premises. Generative AI, for its part, offers substance in the midst of all the hype, but it, too, is a relative blip in the overall portfolio of enterprise IT.

Next time you start to panic that your enterprise is about to fall behind, take a look at how quickly enterprise preferences for programming languages and databases change.

The persistence of Java

A little over a decade ago developers came up with a host of new languages. Go, TypeScript, CoffeeScript, F#, Dart, and more. Fast forward to 2024 and it’s still pretty much Java, Python, JavaScript, and C# on top of the popularity charts, whether RedMonk’s or IEEE’s. When a language does break through and find persistent, growing success, such as TypeScript, it’s the anomaly rather than the norm. As RedMonk’s Steve O’Grady notes of relatively static language rankings, “There was no movement in the top five languages, and less than a third of the top 20 languages moved at all,” which indicates “an environment resistant to change.”