Ken Ketsdever wrote: > I know that Macromedia claims something like 97% market saturation for > Flash player. Does anyone know the numbers for Adobe Reader?
That's harder, and terms matter. Here's the background. For the last umpteen years, every quarter Macromedia has hired NPD/MediaMetrix to ask its regular online consumer focus groups "Can you see this page? how about this page? now how about this one?" That's the data behind these ongoing consumer audits: http://www.macromedia.com/software/player_census/flashplayer/ That's where "98% of consumers tested could immediately see Flash content" and "89% of consumers tested could immediately see PDF content" came from. But... what type of PDF content? For SWF, there's an additional set of version-to-version tests, shown here: http://www.macromedia.com/software/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html The PDF, AVI, QT and other files are just ancient ones, 2.0 or 3.0 versions usually. This tends to over-represent the number of consumers who could see the usual type of file you'd produce today. We also know for a fact that as download size goes up, download rate goes down. A few years back the Flash team did consumer tests, adding blank bits to downloads, to see what happened to adoption rates. Bigger downloads get updated less frequently. Compare version penetration on Flash (above) to that of the larger Shockwave Player, for instance: http://www.macromedia.com/software/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html The Macromedia Flash Player has been achieving an astounding 80% adoption rate within a year of release. Other larger downloads (like Acrobat, Firefox etc) get nothing close to that. So... you can count on the fact that >80% of consumers tested could immediately see PDF 3.0 files. You can also count on the fact that the audience for a particular site you're making may or may not match overall consumer norms... a controlled intranet, for example, could have who-knows-what kind of audience technographics. I don't know how such measurements will be made after the merger, but I'm pretty confident we'll have more detailed stats here in a year or two. (Marlon, I'd definitely recommend installing the current Adobe Reader v7.0... much faster to start up than prior versions were.) jd -- John Dowdell . Macromedia Developer Support . San Francisco CA USA Weblog: http://www.macromedia.com/go/blog_jd Aggregator: http://www.macromedia.com/go/weblogs Technotes: http://www.macromedia.com/support/ Spam killed my private email -- public record is best, thanks. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Find out how CFTicket can increase your company's customer support efficiency by 100% http://www.houseoffusion.com/banners/view.cfm?bannerid=49 Message: http://www.houseoffusion.com/lists.cfm/link=i:5:178464 Archives: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/threads.cfm/5 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/lists.cfm/link=s:5 Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.5 Donations & Support: http://www.houseoffusion.com/tiny.cfm/54
