I think the issue is that this particular niche (Domino, and in particular Domino consultancy) is shrinking and others are growing. Run a job search on any freelance board, and what do you find? PHP, Ruby, ASP.NET, Java, C# (probably in that order), and so on.. There are many, many more projects for PHP developers than Domino developers available.
As an independent developer, does it matter what IBM is doing with Quickr? Or Same time? Or mash-ups? When you're looking for clients, and what most clients want is to have an e-commerce site of some sort quickly and professionally built, four things come in to play:
1. Hosting cost
2. Development time
3. Security
4. What the client wants
This obviously is a list for new clients, or clients without an established web host.
Number four generally is the most important. Followed by number one (since price is usually involved in what the client wants all around). If a small business can have a booking site built for his hotel in PHP and pay 1500.00 for it (and most such sites bid out at much, much less than that), how many are going to want to pay 3000.00 or more for the same site built in Domino knowing that any future development costs will be higher than what they can find for the comparable PHP site? While, as developers, we may argue that security is important, and that Domino's security model is simpler and easier to implement, many of the customers requesting PHP applications only care about authentication/registration of users and a basic security model. Nothing fancy. Most also will presume (and expect) that a developer will have a stock library and database to use for this purpose, so that it will not add to the time required to build the app. In today's markets, if the prospective developer doesn't have these, or wants to charge more for a more robust security setup, they'll simply find someone who will do it without the extra charge, just to have the work.
Clients who do have an established web host are going to want to stick with what they already have in place. If they're not hosting their own site, that often means go daddy or iPage (in the US), or some other commercial host. How many of those are Domino? Not many. Granted not every business needs their site hosted by someone else, but there is a lot of work in building this type of site/application.
I think the issue is that this particular niche (Domino, and in particular Domino consultancy) is shrinking and others are growing. Run a job search on any freelance board, and what do you find? PHP, Ruby, ASP.NET, Java, C# (probably in that order), and so on.. There are many, many more projects for PHP developers than Domino developers available.
As an independent developer, does it matter what IBM is doing with Quickr? Or Same time? Or mash-ups? When you're looking for clients, and what most clients want is to have an e-commerce site of some sort quickly and professionally built, four things come in to play:
1. Hosting cost
2. Development time
3. Security
4. What the client wants
This obviously is a list for new clients, or clients without an established web host.
Number four generally is the most important. Followed by number one (since price is usually involved in what the client wants all around). If a small business can have a booking site built for his hotel in PHP and pay 1500.00 for it (and most such sites bid out at much, much less than that), how many are going to want to pay 3000.00 or more for the same site built in Domino knowing that any future development costs will be higher than what they can find for the comparable PHP site? While, as developers, we may argue that security is important, and that Domino's security model is simpler and easier to implement, many of the customers requesting PHP applications only care about authentication/registration of users and a basic security model. Nothing fancy. Most also will presume (and expect) that a developer will have a stock library and database to use for this purpose, so that it will not add to the time required to build the app. In today's markets, if the prospective developer doesn't have these, or wants to charge more for a more robust security setup, they'll simply find someone who will do it without the extra charge, just to have the work.
Clients who do have an established web host are going to want to stick with what they already have in place. If they're not hosting their own site, that often means go daddy or iPage (in the US), or some other commercial host. How many of those are Domino? Not many. Granted not every business needs their site hosted by someone else, but there is a lot of work in building this type of site/application.