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April 24, 2006
MS on Flash ubiquity
MS on Flash ubiquity: Funny. Earlier this year, when the consumer Player audits were first published, I heard that some Microsoft staff had objected that these figures were impossible -- that Adobe could not actually be receiving 5,000,000 post-install pings each day, that NPD/MediaMetrix did not actually find that half of all consumers tested could immediately view Flash 8 content, just three months after Player 8's release. Now Microsoft's lawyers in the European Union bundling case are proclaiming those same stats themselves: "Microsoft also cited the use of Macromedia Flash 8, which it said was installed on more than half of all European and U.S. computers connected to the Internet, with 80 percent projected by the end of this year." There's a second reported quote found by ActionScript Hero: "[Flash] has a bigger market share than both Microsoft's Media Player and QuickTime." Consumers adopt small invisible commitments like plugins faster than big visible commitments like browser upgrades, and much much faster than committing to new operating systems -- a predictable capability on the majority of consumer machines gives you a bigger audience, more quickly, than big browsers or operating systems can. I'll add my auditing caveats in the comments, but I still think this is the top under-reported story of 2005.
Posted by John Dowdell at April 24, 2006 08:17 AM
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Caveats on these statistics:
o Any sample may not reflect your audience... the people who visit a given site may vary significantly from the general consumer audience. Use it as a guide for the relative increases in audience strength, not as a prediction for what percentage of your own site's audience will support particular abilities.
o I think that NPD/MediaMetrix test could use improvement, myself... some of those test files are ancient generic digital-video files, and these tend to hide the problems people have today with QT & WMP versioning. Plugin versioning and adoption rates are bigger problems than plugin identity these days.
o Sometimes the key idea gets hidden behind the stats: For Ajax/Web2.0 work, your abilities are constrained by your audience's capabilities, and the single neutral service layer of universally-adopted browser plugins evolves your audience's capabilities faster than anything else out there.
Posted by: John Dowdell at April 24, 2006 08:49 AM