One of our competitors is trying to stir up excitement because in two months there have been 10,000 downloads from their web site.
Now, what’s a little weird about that particular press release is that the same competitor was trying to stir up excitement just a few months ago with the news that in two months there had been 3,500 downloads from a different web site.
Someone sure is keen on announcing download counts! If the competitor continues on its current track, we can predict the next announcement in the series. But first we need to figure out the growth rate.
- The first announcement was 3500 downloads in two months, a rate of 1750 downloads/month, in November 2011.
- The second announcement was 10,000 downloads in two months, a rate of 5000 downloads/month, in April 2012.
So we can calculate that in five months their download rate increased by 3250 downloads/month, for an average download acceleration of 650 downloads/(month**2).
Adding five months to April makes it September. So if the competitor stays on the same track, they will issue a press release in September touting that they have had 22,500 downloads in the previous two months.
These don’t seem like very impressive numbers to us, since as the corporate sponsor of Wireshark we’re familiar with Wireshark download rates. Wireshark is downloaded more than 500,000 times every month.
So when does this competitor get into the same league? At their current growth rate, this particular competitor will need to wait 692 months. That’s 57 years, 8 months. Mark your calendar now for December, 2069!
If you’d like to know more about why Wireshark gets more than 500K downloads per month, there's a great learning opportunity coming up in June: Sharkfest 12! You can register at http://sharkfest.wireshark.org/.