2008-01-16

The guilty ?

Hudson Barton made on January 12 some quite emotional comments concerning my latest posts. Funny that he seems to omit to mention that, besides my non scientifically website visits analysis (and therefore indeed highly speculative, i agree), i made a reference to a statement of a Skype Director: We're nearing saturation on PCs he said!

Therefore, i made a speculation (yes, i am guilty, (grin) ) and lucky hazard made that a Skype Director confirmed my speculation. I never said that Skype downloads “reached a plateau”, as Hudson misquotes me. The graph below shows that downloads are indeed rising steadily!I agree that downloads on its own isn’t the right measure to evaluate the growth of Skype. It is however one of the tools or numbers i have to make some analysis together with the main one: concurrent users online (here we agree!). Hudson however pretends that “ "downloads" shows exponential growth”. Well, there i disagree completely. The first 6 months of 2007 showed a linear growth (a STRAIGHT red LINE = LINEAR growth, NOT exponential). The second half of 2007 was somehow erratic. Mainly linear, besides some surges due to promotions. The last two months show again a linear tendency (green “linear” line) with even a lower slope than before.

There is another reason why downloads “on its own” isn’t a measure of the Skype growth: it also depends on the rate of new releases: the last 6 months Skype released only 11 new Windows clients compared to 23 in the previous 6 months. And some people upgrade systematically (like i do!).

No doubt, Skype is still growing, but 2007 was a deceiving year! More about that in later blogposts.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Jean! You didn't report that 11 million concurrent users were online as of 7/1... ;)
/Andreas

Jean Mercier said...

Hello Andreas,
You are right. I was so busy (work) that i noticed it 2 days after. As other bloggers had already blogged it, i refrained to blog on it myself.

But i mentioned it in some (comments) in my previous blogposts.