⇥ Breaking into the PHP market
Bringing your products into the PHP world can be very tricky indeed.
There is so much variety in the PHP market that one can easily get lost.
At Blue Parabola, one of the services that we offer is to help companies understand the PHP market and position their products within it. It’s a tricky proposition—the world of PHP can be very strange (even to someone who has been in it for many years) and companies have to contend with a considerable amount of misinformation.
This is not to say, however, that a few simple considerations can go a long way in helping any company formulate a good PHP strategy—the specifics vary considerable from case to case, but some of the basics hold true regardless.
There is no one PHP
The first thing that a company wishing to break into the PHP market needs to understand is how to tie its technology with PHP. This is not a simple problem to solve, because the market is highly fragmented.Some companies will want to convince you that the right way to make a technology work with PHP is to tie it with their framework. This is wrong. No framework has enough market penetration to justify making an investment in it to the exclusion of any other framework—and, in fact, there are plenty of companies that use “straight” PHP and have developed their own infrastructure. Along the same lines, a lot of developers use PHP tangentially to relying on an application-level framework, like Drupal or WordPress.
Therefore, supporting a specific framework is wasteful—as is trying to get a C extension into core (it’s just not going to happen—most core developers already think that core is too bloated) . Your best bet is to adopt a holistic approach and build your participation in the PHP ecosystem from the bottom up: start with supporting “plain” PHP and then implement connectors in as many popular PHP frameworks as you can.
There is no one community
Zend has claimed that there are 4.5 million PHP developers in the world. To me, this begs the question: where are they? Obviously, they are not at ZendCon, or php|tek, or DrupalCon, which is twice as large as both of them combined. And they are not, I am sorry to say, subscribers to our magazine, either.Based on my personal, empirical knowledge (backed up by some educated guesses based on the factual numbers in my possession), the size of the community is probably closer to 500,000-1,000,000 users. This takes in consideration our database of users—you know, real people—and a guesstimate of how much market reach we actually have.
The fact is, however, that this number is entirely useless. What companies need to know is how many people actually matter in the community—as well, of course, as which communities matter. There are some PHP “developers” that you will never reach, no matter how much money you spend; but there are maybe 100-200 people worldwide who can, in turn, reach a disproportionately huge segment of the market: these are the people whose opinion you need to value and influence.
There is no one reach
Another significant problem is that there is no easy way to reach a significant portion of the community, either. The PHP Group has made it abundantly clear that they have no interest in community-building resources—they prefer to focus on the technical aspect of things.Even if they did, however, there is a very large portion of the PHP community that does not, in fact, consider itself part of the PHP community at all. I am talking about users of application frameworks, like Drupal, WordPress, Joomla!, Symfony, CakePHP, and so on. While these projects could not exist without PHP, they have become powerful enough that they have generated their own critical mass of users and, by extension, their own communities that are entirely separate from the “PHP community.”
All these elements—and many more that are well beyond the scope of this post—make PHP a difficult market to understand—let alone penetrate—without a considerate look at its history, development and philosophy.
Photo credit: Reading Station Market by Tim Wilson
Comments
very nice piece! There’s a section missing after ‘most core developers already think…’; please elaborate what they think
Thanks Ivo—fixed.
Marco,
This is a good post. As I sit here at ZendCon and think back over what I’ve seen this week, one of your points strikes a chord with me. I do appreciate Zend, Microsoft and IBM coming together to create the new simple cloud API. (the url escapes me at the moment…forgive me, it’s early) I would however, like to have seen more of the PHP community involved in this project. As you stated, no one framework has enough penetration to make it THE framework so I would have liked to see Zend reach out to the other two major frameworks and invite their participation in the project.
It would have been nice if Microsoft, who seems to have a clue these days, stepped up and insisted that there be more than just Zend Framework represented before they would get involved. This would both help the project enjoy wider acceptance and it would help cement their role as a thought leader in the PHP community and not just the community bartender. (Not that I’m complaining about their role as community bartender)
Beyond that, I think your estimate of PHP developers is much more accurate than the 4.5 million number. In their defense, Zend did not use the PIDOMA methodology to arrive at that number, they got it from the Evans Data Corp (No relation) who published it this past spring.
Thanks for the thought provoking post.
=C=
Good article! To say 4.5 million users is kind of vague without breaking down the meaning of who is a ‘user’. I would even go further than what Marco has suggested in terms of Community members and breakdown that down into 3 more groups. From my experience these are the people that matter to a company trying to cater to the PHP market:
(A) PHP App User: Uses applications written in PHP and has no direct exposure to the code
(B) PHP App Developer: Maintains and develop with plain PHP or apps/frameworks
(C) PHP App Engineer: Frameworks/CMS/applications in general
(D) PHP Core Engineer: PHP 5/6
Group (A) > (B) > (C) > (D). There would be some people who are in all 4 groups, but I say the 4.5 million is right if you consider PHP App Users (A). As Marco pointed out, most people who fall under the (A) category might not even know that the app they are using was written in PHP (i.e. Drupal admins/artists/managers/content providers). Why should they care? It works and they don’t have to maintain it, but, they are the ones who will pay you to use your app. All you have to do is Maintain, support & improve the app with your Engineers who rely on the Core Engineers that make the whole thing possible in the first place.
Groups (B), (C) and (D) seek IT knowledge and some will even pay for it by going to a conference, subscribing to a magazine or buying a book. Now, knowledge is a tricky thing to sell and some might even argue that it should be free. There’s a very fine line there. There’s also the problem of the very short expiry date of any kind of knowledge in the IT world. For example, the average shelf-life of an IT book is 6 months! Knowledge on Technology is hard to sell. Your audience is small, gets bored easily and is always hungry so you better keep their attention with lots of interesting knowledge and show them sharks with laser beams mounted on their heads. Ok, maybe not laser beams, but you get the idea.
So, pick the group you want to sell to wisely young grasshopper. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and calibrate some pulse rifles.
- A