It used to be when a new software product was launched, reporters dutifully asked the vendor how it was doing a few days or weeks thereafter. It's not like this anymore as evidenced by the Computerworld story assessing last Thursday's launch of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). The story talks about how IE8 market share can be tracked hour by hour from the moment it was launched. Invariably, the response went something like this: Reporter: "How's the new spreadsheet software doing now that it's been in the market for a few days?" Vendor: "Great, we're on target." Reporter: "How many have you sold?" Vendor: "That's confidential." In other words, users, investors or whatever constituency had to rely on vague and sometimes misleading claims or third party estimates. In this case, it was two services that monitor such things, namely StatCounter and Net Applications.
Their results as of yesterday were within one tenth of one percent of each other, suggesting the data is reliable. It's the same transparency that President Obama talks about. As of midday, Net Applications"said IE8 had 2.1% of the browser market and StatCounter said 2.0%. Both companies, coincidentally, were founded in 1999. StatCounter tracks browser usage using something called a web tracker which is code put on the sites of StateCounter's two million customers. From that, StatCounter extracts a sample and from there determines which browser – IE8, IE 7, IE6, Firefox 3, Firefox 2 and so forth – was used for view each every page. "They're not measuring IE8 downloads, but rather what percentage of those four billion page views came from an IE8 browser," she said. That equates to three million web sites and four billion web pages a month, a spokeswoman said. For several years, the Internet has put everything in full view.
You can run, but you can't hide.
0 comments:
Post a Comment