blog: xplorer2 sales SOS

Post by **nikos** » 2010 Oct 13, 15:47

mid-week version of the blog
http://www.zabkat.com/blog/13Oct10-sales-downhill.htm
xplorer2 does it like the greek economy

Kilmatead · Post by **Kilmatead** » 2010 Oct 13, 17:12

Considering that my own recent adventures in penury are rather well documented here, I can say from experience that animal sacrifice won't help (unless you're making rabbit stew). There are those that might find that funny - it wasn't meant to be.

One thing your pretty graphs don't seem to correlate is geographical location (sales conduit vs. installers vs. negative feedback when un-installing).

User Base: Population wise, one assumes the US and Europe to be main contributors (observation of the forums seems to suggest the "hard core", if that term applies, seem to be European). There are, as has been discussed previously on the forums, file managers that are slightly more user friendly (if at the sacrifice of some technicality) - x2 seems to appeal to a certain "type" of more technically minded individual who perhaps don't feel they need "flashy bits". Unfortunately for you (and humanity as a progressive species), this would be a minor end of the population, so perhaps surfeits can be expected.

Any recent trends (or even statistics) geographically (China, Russia, Singapore, Korea)?

kunkel321 · Post by **kunkel321** » 2010 Oct 13, 17:37

Kilmatead wrote:... I can say from experience that animal sacrifice won't help (unless you're making rabbit stew). ...

This is definitely my new favorite quote!!!

Coincidently, At my work place, everyone is sick because of flu season... But I suppose that's a regional thing.

As far as SEOs and making xplorer2 more relevant to Google searches.... Just rename it "XXXplower2" he he I kid.

fgagnon · Post by **fgagnon** » 2010 Oct 13, 18:12

I note that the "installs" count, although trending down, has not suffered the same collapse as "$ales".

This suggests to me that the AV false positive hypothesis may be significant because there was such a false positive reporting in the past week. (ref: http://forum.zabkat.com/viewtopic.php?t=8225 )
And although it has since been corrected, it could have scared the folks who run AVG and installed the trial version of xplorer2 to uninstall it rather than evaluate and buy it.

Post by **nikos** » 2010 Oct 14, 05:47

why would geography be involved? Most sales come from americans anyway!

another parameter that could also be important is whether there's a decline as a whole to the software or file management market. But i bet some people will be increasing whereas others share xplorer2's fate

fred from the plot it is definite that the decrease in website visitors is to blame, and although the drop is not 50% it must be that whatever visitors are missing are the buying kind, not the timewaster kind

pdavit · Post by **pdavit** » 2010 Oct 14, 08:15

For starters let's assume that Crack Tracker did not affect sales of xplorer2. And I'm not referring here to workload, efforts spend elsewhere and the likes. But maybe the principle of some people to oppose to those that fight piracy. I'm not gonna argue here more on what's good or bad, morally wrong or fair and rewarding. The piracy topic has been analyzed numerous times in the past, let that be sales in the music industry, the film industry, software etc. I'm just bumping this topic up in an attempt to find the route cause of xplorer2 sales drop.

Other than that, you might consider practicing what we "all" hate but follow, i.e. a "Microsoft approach" where you can move things around in your application, dress them more appealing, advertise non-existing groundbreaking new features no one needs but outlined in a manner that will create new needs out of nothing and as a result easily decrease version life-cycle with more releases pushing sales with constantly masquerading a "wheel reinvention". I'm sure you won't follow the aforementioned approach since beyond your moral grounds as so vividly proven so far. It's only a joke that encapsulates though a lot of truth.

Finally, it's a given fact that users (and that is not followers of xplorer-like, TotalCommander-like, AltapSalamander-like applications) tend to prefer pretty over functional. Virtually none of the powerful file managers are esthetically pleasing (possibly with an exception of Directory Opus

), but the major user-base, the bulk number of users (new or existing) will follow pretty more easily.

The experts user-base is a lot fewer than the constantly growing user-base of more and more technologically impaired people joining the computing era. Which is better a B&W speaker or a Sonus Faber one? I'll go for the latter. Yet again many people know, own and are happy with their B&Ws and know nothing about the existence of the Italian masterpieces of Sonus Faber.

jcmn · Post by **jcmn** » 2010 Oct 14, 08:36

I think you have to update more frequently Xplorer. You have stopped development for quite a long time.

I also use other file commercial managers and some are very active in development.

Post by **nikos** » 2010 Oct 14, 11:13

let's assume that Crack Tracker did not affect sales of xplorer2

it doesn't
the last time i used crack tracker to remove warez links to xplorer2 was back in july, if not earlier. I will have to do it again once I release a version upgrade, which as I say will be coming in the near future

pdavit · Post by **pdavit** » 2010 Oct 14, 12:24

nikos wrote:...once I release a version upgrade, which as I say will be coming in the near future

With anti-aliasing over icons, skin support, etc. that will make the 6Mb installer 18Mb and degrade application's performance in the altar of aesthetics.

Don't despair. Better days are coming... I want to believe.

atomdrift · Post by **atomdrift** » 2010 Oct 14, 16:39

jcmn wrote:I think you have to update more frequently Xplorer. You have stopped development for quite a long time.
I also use other file commercial managers and some are very active in development.

I don't understand why this should matter. If the program works well with current OSes, and there are no more useful features to add, why would it need an update?

I suppose there are always more useful features that can be added (within reason), and perhaps the point is that the fickle people we're discussing here will tend to buy a program that was updated a week ago (indicating its supposed shiny newness) over a program that was updated 6 months ago, even though if they stopped to think for a second, the 6 month old program would prove to be just as well, or better.

I suppose that's the difference between the aforementioned tech users who know what they need and don't want bloat, and the fickle "consumer" type people out there who unfortunately make up the bulk of sales.

Frankly, I'm happy not to have to update very often.

jcmn · Post by **jcmn** » 2010 Oct 14, 18:54

atomdrift wrote:
I suppose there are always more useful features that can be added (within reason), and perhaps the point is that the fickle people we're discussing here will tend to buy a program that was updated a week ago (indicating its supposed shiny newness) over a program that was updated 6 months ago, even though if they stopped to think for a second, the 6 month old program would prove to be just as well, or better.

That's your opinion. I am an heavy user of file managers and I can say that there is no perfect file manager. Each one has always something that can be improved or implemented.

Kilmatead · Post by **Kilmatead** » 2010 Oct 14, 19:13

There's also the small consideration that people are more likely to buy something which is demonstrably "still in development" - which can sometimes not be obvious the older the last release date may be.

kunkel321 · Post by **kunkel321** » 2010 Oct 14, 23:06

Kilmatead wrote:There's also the small consideration that people are more likely to buy something which is demonstrably "still in development" - which can sometimes not be obvious the older the last release date may be.

I think the constant updates are important. The software market in general is always evolving, and many of those “evolutionary branches” become dead ends. Nobody wants to invest (time or $) in a dead end. Of course we can tell an app (such as x2) isn’t fading away into the darkness when there’s daily support forum participation. But another way to tell is by the continued updates. And let’s face it—updates are fun! Or maybe I’m the only one that installs an update or new version and promptly reads the Change Log, then plays with (er um tests) all the new features. Lastly, I think a lot of software forums and blogs like to be the first to discuss “what’s new” out there.

Hey, x2 was on bitsdujour a while back with a 50% discount. What effect did that have on sales? Maybe you should see about getting it on there again…. This time do a 55% discount. The bigger discount will give bloggers something to write about. Regulars on this forum can go out and seed some different sites with the info (i.e. the date it’s offered). We can call it “Zabkat’s feed-the-baby campaign.”

narayan · Post by **narayan** » 2010 Oct 15, 03:06

I think we must distinguish between forum activities directed at removing people' s doubts and operating troubles vs. those directed at the roadmap (handling the new feature wishlist+discussion).

If the forum is full of the former, people get reassured of support. That's hygiene factor.

If the forum is also full of the latter, people look forward to getting new features. That's the wow factor.

Even if a product is far ahead of the competition, a certain bare minimum level of new feature development activity must exist to demonstrate sign of life (and vitality).

If we see the Wikipedia comparisons of any product category, they have three columns: "first release", "Current version" and "last updated". These figures tell their own story, and I do make my own selection based on that information.

dunno · Post by **dunno** » 2010 Oct 15, 12:38

could it perhaps be that,
X2 is way to complicated for the average user.
Interface isn't intuitive for average user.

e.g. When a average user gets a stream error message during copying what do you think its reaction is going to be ?. ( my guess is uninstall the app).

ever wonder why most OS's copy OSX, because apple keeps it simple.

I reckon that if you made a version of X2 that did away with the bells and whistles that you developers so desire, market share might increase.

To summarise,

Keep it simple and it MUST do the basics well, i.e. copy and move without any errors displayed which have no meaning to the user, this copy and move thing has been flogged to death here, Windows vs Apple styles etc.., but there are still bugs within x2 that preclude me from trusting x2's copy function with NESTED folders.

I use X2 because of the dual panes with tabs, that's it. Do I recommend this application, only if the users want dual panes. Most of the people I know aren't power users, and they REALLY don't care about the intricacies of software, they just want it to do the basics well, i.e dual panes copy, move, and compare contents of folders easily.

Why not have a version for average users, and a Pro version for power users ?, and X2 lite doesn't qualify as a fully featured version for average users.