A majority of Java projects will fail because of a continuing lack of skilled programmers and the high salaries they command.

Mark Driver, research director at Gartner, said there are currently around 2.5 million Java programmers in the world, but only around 800,000 of those have genuinely appropriate knowledge. The rest are either home taught or college leavers with little business experience. He said it costs up to three times more to recruit and keep Java programmers than Microsoft Visual Basic experts.

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