Petteri Pyyny
23 May 2003 16:10
Sharman Networks, the owner of the P2P application Kazaa claimed today that its application is soon going to take its spot as "Net's most popular program ever".
Sharman's claims are based on Download.com's figures, where the #1 spot currently belongs to AOL's instant messaging program, ICQ. ICQ has -- as of midday today in East coast -- currently 229,363,307 downloads and Kazaa has now 229,150,955 downloads. Kazaa is currently been downloaded over 300,000 times a day from Download.com, whereas ICQ is downloaded only 50,000 times a day (ICQ is just much, MUCH older application).
The claims are all fine and nice and obviously highlight that Kazaa has been an enormous success, despite its flaws and problems (broken downloads, fake files, etc). But basing such claims only on Download.com's figures is simply ridiculous -- AFAIK, AOL's WinAMP has an existing userbase of over 250M, Macromedia claims that appx. 90 percent of world's browsers have their Flash application installed (and believe me, there are more browsers installed than P2P tools in this world), WinZIP is one of the tools that everybody downloads and installs immediately after installing Windows, etc. So, to put Sharman's hype in perspective: Kazaa is soon (if not already, haven't checked the figures on Download.com yet) the most popular software download at Download.com.
Source: CNet's News.com (owners of Download.com as well..)