What percentage of software developers are involved in the creation of custom/bespoke software? This should include both employees of companies with in-house development shops and freelance web developers, consultants, etc. (Basically everything excluding the folks who write the "shrink-wrapped" stuff.)
NOTE: This is for research purposes, so I'm looking for something approximating an accurate statistic. (In other words, my intention isn't to poll the stackoverflow user base.)
We have both "off the shelf" products and custom projects. I think that is a great combination. Sometimes the customers of the custom products buy our of the shelf products.
I do not know real numbers, but of my informal observations, it's pretty much 99% of all developers are doing custom work.
Some custom work then turns into Shrink Wrap, but in order to do that there is a HUGE effort that is needed...when you can assume all machines are WinXP with at least a GB of RAM and they will all use IE6, then you can take HUGE shortcuts. The second you want to distribute to the world at large, you need to go back and add in tons of "just in case" code. I have seen it literally take 3x as long (18 months in this case) than the original product took to develop. And there were still problems.
I, personally, am involved in custom software. I'm not sure what the total percentage plays out like, but I would say the majority are involved in custom software.
I also do not know of any hard numbers on the number of software developers building custom software. But based on past message board discussions I have read and participated in an overwhelmingly number of developers build bespoke software. In fact every similar discussion I have seen shows close to a 10-1 ratio of custom devs to shrink-wrap devs.
You could try hitting some local user groups and polling them to get some hard numbers for your area. I would expect it to show the same kind of ratio.