How many creators are in the world?

[dturchin]

That's not a religious question. Or a philosophical or metaphysical one. It's one I asked myself expecting the answer to be a Google or Quora search away. The closer I got to an answer the more I realized it's the wrong question. We're all creators now. In an age when everything's a platform, everyone's a creator.

My six year old Dara's a creator who uses Scratch to animate ballerinas. My ninety-three year old grandma's a creator who develops (adorable) photo journals on Snapfish. IDC says there are 18.5 million developers based on census data from 90 countries but that's like saying there are three million trout in the world because that's how many were caught last weekend in Lake Michigan. Others claim that number is anywhere from 10 to 100 million but who cares…they're all hopelessly wrong.

It's time we redefine "developer" for the modern era of content creation. It must include anyone who publishes anything that's consumed in an app. It's time we call them what they are: creators. Creators don't all hang out on GitHub and read Stack Overflow. Creators don't all write JavaScript or even shell scripts. Heck, most think Ubuntu has fins and lives in Loch Ness. And yet, they create the world's most engaging content and their creations generate more page views than Snapchat or Instagram or Pinterest ever will.

The cult of apps began six years ago with the launch of the App Store. Yet today, it's still painful for non-programmers to create cross-platform apps for all three screens, ones that work offline, support push notifications, self-monitor and self-heal. The sooner we shed perceptions about who creates applications the sooner we'll develop tools that serve their needs.

A quick survey of what's getting funded in Silicon Valley confirms it: we'll see more innovation in app dev over the next five years than we've seen in the previous thirty. Expect platforms designed for and by creators. Expect lines between dev and ops to continue to blur and expect cloud infrastructure provisioning and auto-scaling to become transparent. Compute resources and storage will soon be utility-reliable and Facebook-accessible like electricity or plumbing.

The key takeaway for creators: keep creating. Keep focusing on delightful user experiences and compelling content. We GitHub literati learn slowly... but finally understand you're the new boss.

Grandma: I expect big things!