Major US users spent over $1m on average on software last year, a 9.5% increase, according to Sentry Market Research, Westborough, Massachusetts. The 1990 Software Market Survey of 2,000 major users projects a worldwide corporate software market of $25,000m this year for US-based firms. Overall growth in the corporate market will be in the 11% to 15% range this year, up on the 10% to 12% last year, but sharply down on the 30% plus of the mid-1980s. It finds that new applications take 29 months to develop, and says that data processing staff still spend 70% of their time on maintenance.
