Every year, I like to take a couple of minutes and pull my log files to get a quick and dirty look at who might be making use of MarcEdit. This year, I was also interested in how quickly MarcEdit 7 is being picked up, as the application install base is large and diverse and I’m thinking about how many maintenance releases I’m planning over this next year related to MarcEdit 6 (thinking 4 at this point).
Look at the numbers:
Number of Executions: ~3 million
Executions are measured by tracking those users that make use of the automated update/notifications tool. Since MarcEdit will ping the update service, I get a rough idea of how often the program was started during the year. However, as this only captures uses of folks taking advantage of the notification service, and are online — this number represents only a slice of usage.
Countries: ~190
Again, using the log files from the update service, the analytic software I use provides an set of broad country/administrative region codes. Over the course of 2017, ~190 individual regions were represented, with ~120 regions have an active presence, month-over-month.
MarcEdit 7/MacOS Downloads
This I’m interested in because I’m curious about the rate of adoption. On update, I usually see ~8-10,000 active users that routinely update the software. Looking at Dec. 2017 (first month of release) and Jan. 2018 — it looks like folks are slowly starting to test and put MarcEdit 7 through it’s paces. Below, a download represents a unique user.
Dec. 2017: 6,400 total downloads
Jan. 2018: 11,700 total downloads
Finally — how many questions did I get to answer. Again, this is hard to say, but looking just at the MarcEdit Listserv, I provided roughly 5,500 responses. Given questions I get on the list and off, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that I probably answer ~20 questions a day regarding some aspect of the application.
Development Hours: ~820 hrs
This one surprised me, but this past year was spent revising the application — an honestly, it could be low. On average though, it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility to say that I spent ~17 hours per week in 2017 writing code for MarcEdit, most of it happening between the hours of midnight-3 am.
So, that’s roughly a snapshot of 2017 usage. I’ll be interested to see what 2018 will bring.
–tr
Comments
3 responses to “MarcEdit 2017 Usage Information”
“~17 hours per week in 2017”
Dear Terry, it is for me kind of difficult to understand the above, judging by the radical changes made to MarcEdit the previous year. So i guess each hour of yours is really really productive, and translated to say 8 hours of work i would need. A result of your years of hard work, and experience.
All I could ever say is Thank you Teddy!
sorry typo should be *terry