MarcEdit, Windows XP, and what the way too early log analysis says

So, this has been kind of interesting. Since Sunday, I’ve been running a script against my access logs to get a better idea of what the MarcEdit XP user community may look like. I timed this with the update, because I’ve found that in general, a large number of users will update the program within the first couple of weeks of the update. Equality interesting, even though MarcEdit has an automatic updating tool, there are users that stay with very old versions of the 6.x series.

Anyway, couple of interesting things of note since this active log analysis began:

Since Sunday, MarcEdit’s automatic update script has been pinged north of 250,000+ times. That means that since Sunday, users that make use of the autoupdate notifications have opened the program to do work at least a quarter of a million times.
Since Sunday, MarcEdit has been updated ~7000 times. I’ve estimated that the active user community is around 11-12k users, but that year over year, the update service will report a unique user count in the high 20,000s. Assuming that these are the most active users, I think this gives an idea of who will be most immediately impacted by any potential change in XP support.
Of those approximate 7000 users, 9 run XP. The largest number of these users come from China and India, but surprisingly, there are still US users (at academic institutions based on the IPs reported) that still run XP…my god.
Surprisingly, the mostly widely used Windows Operating system reported was Windows 8.1. I honestly expected to see Windows 7. But by usage, the breakdown was Windows 8.x, Windows 10, then Windows 7. I really thought the order was going to be Windows 7, 10, then 8.x.

So what can I learn from this way to early analysis of the update/usage information. First, it confirms a suspicion that I’ve had for a while that XP is very much in the minority among MarcEdit’s most active users…and that’s actually about it. What I anticipate seeing is that the initial trends (can 7 users be a trend) that shows XP usage largely concentrated in China and India (since these are both large user communities). I’m honestly also curious if this will extend to the Middle East. Year over year, the Middle East represents the 3rd highest concentration of MarcEdit users. The question for me as this picture becomes more clear is how wide spread XP use actually is — and that I just don’t know yet. Oh, and third…I keep thinking there is a paper to be written here…if I could just find the time. 🙂

–tr