One Million Downloads? (Premium)

Microsoft reported this week that there have been more than one million downloads of its Edge previews. That’s not good. In fact, given how easy it is to prove what a disaster this is, I’m a bit surprised the software giant even provided the figure.

Here’s the quote.

“Our community has been with us on this journey from the beginning and your feedback is making it possible to rapidly improve,” Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore wrote in a post announcing the first beta build of the next Microsoft Edge. “To date, there have been more than one million downloads of our preview builds [emphasis Belfiore’s], across all supported versions of Windows and Mac, from which we have received more than 140,000 individual pieces of feedback.”

One million.

That’s it?

I mean, I’ve downloaded the new Edge---and no, I’m not counting daily or week updates, I mean fresh downloads from the Edge Insider Preview website---dozens of times all by myself. Where are all the users?

Remember, there are 1.5 billion Windows users overall, and all of them can run the new Edge. The last I heard there were 825 million Windows 10 users alone. There are hundreds of millions of Mac users too.

Hold on, you say. Most of those people aren’t interested in testing software, after all.

Fair. But if I’m reading Dona Sarkar’s Twitter profile correctly, there are 16 million Windows Insiders. And even if that figure is inflated to include other enthusiast groups of which she’s a part, there are certainly several million active Insiders. Are you telling me that only a tiny fraction of them---5 to 10 percent---aren’t testing the new Edge?

Really?

Seriously, think about that for a moment. There are several million active testers of Windows 10, according to Microsoft. And only 5 to 10 percent of them have even downloaded the new Edge just once? That’s nuts. But I guess it’s true. And that’s bad news if you were hoping that Microsoft’s strategy of embracing Chromium was going to somehow reverse its fortunes in web browser usage.

Yes, it’s only in preview. And maybe something as raw as the Canary and Developer previews is simply too scary for those testers.

Guys, that never stopped anyone from testing good software. Ever.

In its first 18 months in the market---during several of which it was in a prerelease state---Netscape Navigator had an installed base of 38 million users. By early 1998, it had been downloaded over 90 million times. Remember that this was the age of dial-up, too: Most of those users were not on speedier ISDN, DSL, or cable modem connections. They were literally dialing in over a phone line at speeds measured in Kbs, not Mbs or Gbs. That was over 20 years ago, folks.

So, what’s different? What changed?

Actually, it’s pretty simple, and it’s something I’ve been harping on for a long time. PC users aren’t as engaged as are mobile users. They don’t experiment with apps on PCs anymore, ins...