Three million downloads of Macromedia's plugin a day.
Ten million downloads of Autodesk's DWF Viewer.
Five hundred million copies of Acrobat Reader floating about.
Impressive numbers, yet there was always something that bothered me about them. They sounded inflated. Then it struck me: multiple versions. Each time a new version comes out, the downloads of the free software start all over again. By the same users (plus a few more).
Reader is at version 7.0.7. DWF Viewer is at version 6.5. And I don't really care what version Macromedia is at.
Divide the download numbers by the number of versions to arrive at a truer picture. I probably have 50 copies of Reader sitting on distribution CDs. Divide 500 million by 50 = 100 million. Or 10 million by 6.5 = 1.5 million. Now that sounds more like it.
Which makes me feel bad for companies that can't boast of millions of downloads. The ceo of a CAD vendor was getting ready to announce the total downloads of his free plug-in. "Guess how many we're going to announce," he urged me. Having all those millions dancing about in my head, I felt I should be conservative and guess low.
"A million?"
His face fell: "Hundred thousand."
Do numbers really matter that much? Often enough, I hear industry editors talking about numbers, and totally missing the actual impact that a company has on users.
I suppose if we wanted to play that game, the Open Design Alliance could claim more users than any CAD vendor. But that, by itself, doesn't mean a whole lot. What does mean something is the impact we have on users -- which is amazingly good, but only because of the applications that our members build using our libraries.
Posted by: Evan Yares | May 30, 2006 at 01:50 AM
Not to mention the number who begin downloading and fail, either due to boredom, internet hiccup or other issue. I would think the "real" numbers of those who actually downloaded, installed, AND have used the software successfully for their intended purpose is probably more like 50% of the totals listed. I know it is on our website, iCADsales.com.
Posted by: Scott Hucke | May 30, 2006 at 06:12 PM
Or the number download multiple times by the same user. I have probably downloaded the latest Adobe Reader a dozen or more times because it's almost as quick to download as it is to find my thumbdrive, copy it over, then install on a users' machine. Numbers like this are pointless.
Posted by: Sean | May 31, 2006 at 06:23 AM