Yesterday I’ve posted about Trial vs. Free Windows Phone 7 app usage. Since I’ve already started analyzing statistics, I decided to look at it from other angle.
One aspect of my “WP7 activism” in recent months has been a “fight” for worldwide expansion of Windows Phone 7 marketplace (they are not awarding WP7 MVP awards for that ;). About 1400 people have signed a petition asking for action or at least information on the subject (have you?), but Microsoft keeps it’s silence. So I decided to look at my app usage data on a country basis.
Note: the data is taken from Google Analytics based on IP addresses. So it’s not affected by people from around the world using US or UK LiveIDs.
The Sad Reality of Excel Economy
I’ve taken the data for Tic-Tac-Toe 3D Free game (available for only 2 weeks) and grouped usage statistics by countries based on whether the country has WP7 Marketplace support or not. The app was used about 3,500 times from 68 countries. Here are the results:
As you can see unsupported countries make up only 13% of free app usage. This means that developers and Microsoft are getting only about 13% less revenue by supporting only 17 countries (actually 16 since, as far as I know, you can’t buy apps in India) instead of the whole world. So on paper (or in Excel) worldwide expansion of marketplace services probably looks like something not worth the effort.
This is what we call “Excel Economy” at work. A few years ago our local government in the face of financial crisis decided to increase taxes in order to increase budget income. It looked like they’ve just changed tax rate in an Excel spreadsheet with data for last year and looked how the number in the “Total” column increased. Unfortunately this is not how things work in real life.
Same goes for this app usage data. Who knows why this number is so low? Do these all “other” countries really make up only 13% of potential buyers? Or maybe they don’t use apps at all because their Zune desktop client doesn’t show “Marketplace” tab at all? Or maybe they didn’t buy WP7 device in the first place because they were told that they won’t have access to the Marketplace?
Here’s another slice of the “Excel Economy”
Looks familiar? USA, Germany, UK, France and Italy make up 85% of the usage while 11 other supported countries only 15%. Why support them?
Anyway, I still don’t understand what’s the problem of supporting more countries is. So don’t 1400 signatories of the petition. But Microsoft likes keeping us in the dark. The same way they let users of Yahoo! Mail loose money on 3G traffic for a month while they solve their corporate problems instead of providing a quick workaround to mitigate the issue.
But I guess some things can’t be explained by logic. Especially when dealing with corporate monsters. It’s time to learn that.
