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January 28, 2004
Viewpoint bozosity
Viewpoint bozosity: A company with a plugin says they're the most popular. Never heard of them? No worries, most haven't. (Here's their original press release, for some reason packaged as PDF.) Problems? Start with the title: Viewpoint Corporation's Media Palyer [sic] Penetration Surpasses That of Windows Media Player 9, Quicktime, Flash 7 and Realplayer, A New Study Suggests" That "new study suggests" is a weasel phrase, gives them an out against legal action. They don't link to methodology, but I assume they're still using a variant of the NPD/MediaMetrix consumer testing that Macromedia has been using for years... I don't anticipate problems there. Note how they include versioning info only when convenient: Flash 7 and Windows Media Player 9 are specified, but no versions for other technologies, including their own. Then you've got a quirk with the Viewpoint Media Player itself... it is a stub which loads more code on demand. They don't mention whether consumers could do the full range of tasks described on the Viewpoint site, only that they detected some unstated amount of Viewpoint code on that machine. For features, Viewpoint's 3D engine has been designed around single-object inspection... useful for retail demos of a watch to twirl around, but it's not as deep as the general-purpose 3D rendering engine in Shockwave.Check out the licensing page for another reason you don't end up seeing much of their stuff. For realtime 3D on the web, all the evidence I've seen points out that all other codebases *combined* don't touch Shockwave's realworld viewership. I don't like it that this press release attempts to mislead people about what you can actually see on the web today, with code already installed on consumer machines. Gargh.
Posted by John Dowdell at January 28, 2004 10:58 AM
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Comments
There's another disparity, and that's a comparison of their numbers with the consumer audits done by MediaMetrix in December:
__Viewpoint study:__
Viewpoint: 64.3%
Shockwave: 58.1%
WMP 9.0: 57.5%
Real: 46.5%
QT: 43.1%
Flash 7: 34%
__Macromedia study:__
All Flash: 98%
Flash 7: ~31%
All WMP: 61%
All Shockwave: 61%
Shockwave 8.5: ~50%
Real: 57%
QT: 47%
Viewpoint: 38%
Neither study provides as much detail as I'd like... I learned in the past verbally that the Acrobat and QuickTime tests in the Macromedia-sponsored study are for version 3.0 files of each, for instance... but the big disparities in the above two tests are for Windows Media Player and the Viewpoint Stub, it's almost like they're measuring or describing different things.
Posted by: jd at January 28, 2004 11:12 AM
jd,
nice to know someone picked this up too. your analysis was deeper, but in the same direction.
http://www.flex-mx.com/archives/000327.html
david (centralmx/flex-mx)
Posted by: David Bisset at January 28, 2004 11:41 AM
Viewpoint 3d format is known in the 3d graphics world. Their current website does not seem to indicate any current development or deployment costs. However, memory recall from 6 months ago provides $zero for a single 60-day license and $500 for each commercial item presented in viewpoint format. It gets too expensive too fast for serious consideration.
Posted by: tom alberts at January 28, 2004 11:58 AM
Viewpoint has pitched us several times over the years, each time with increasing amounts of questionable material and statistics in their presentations.
To the day, their last pitch holds my personal record for shortest amount before I've interrupted somebody during their presentation. Basically, the first sentence of the hour-long presentation was "Viewpoint is the leading developer of interactive plugins on the web". One sentence... that's all it took.
To their credit, there is one thing they actually do pretty well. It's probably the only thing, but it's substantial. Installing Viewpoint's components does not require admin access to your PC or any special privileges. It's quite seamless and easy and I haven't found a circumstance where it doesn't work yet.
Posted by: Mike D. at January 28, 2004 01:23 PM