After talking to a very large number of Drupal professionals all over Europe I know that state of Drupal business varies a lot from country to country. Availability and demand for experienced professionals, size and type of companies and prices definitely vary a lot. This is also apparent if you look at market shares of "the big three" in each European country.

In my previous post I had a look at CMS market shares in Finland. I used the same methods explained in the previous post to do the numbers for all European countries. The results are interesting to say the least.

Customers often ask me about Drupal market share. There are not many numbers on this out there and even less credible ones. Drupal project lead Dries Buytaert announced Drupal market share of 1-2% in his keynote at Drupalcon SF 2010. These results were based on crawling through top 1 million sites in Alexa top sites. I needed more specific results so I started improving on this method. 

A perfect result is often not a prerequisite for success. It is unfortunately quite common for people in a project to get fixated on small details of their project and forget about the big picture. This is especially true with highly visual things such as details of a header of a web site or last visual details of an user interface. Countless hours can be spent to reach just the right shade of red on a header or to find perfect texture for background of a form.

Pricing your work is always difficult. This is especially true in any industry that deals with intangibles like software, literature or other works of art. It is common for inexperienced teams to start by invoicing by the hour. In traditional tangible work - like digging a well - hours are usually interchangeable: A stronger or more motivated worker can dig slightly faster but variations are generally small and predictable. In any work dealing mostly or only with brain power, differences in productivity for different individuals or even days can be huge.

It feels great to work at Mearra! Sure we have our bad moments as everybody, but on most days working is fun, inspiring and challenging. A lot of this has to do with the way we work and with our approach to customer work. I will do my best to share some of our best kept secrets in spirit of open source at this post. I hope that the following post makes you think about your ways of working. Feel free to challenge me in the comments on any of the points I make.