interesting acknowledgement

[nikos]

I was aware of this old article but I just noticed that they are talking about 0.45% of PCs having installed some explorer replacement (they are talking about xplorer2 but without clarification)
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/b8/201 ... -explorer/

so how many PCs are there?
that's a good one for my banker!

[sanferno]

The most popular add-ons and replacements (programs like TeraCopy, FastCopy, xplorer2 & QTTabBar) are installed (note that does not mean used) on about 0.45% of PC’s

Many of these suggestions are for things that after-market add-ons like TeraCopy, QTTabBar, DMEXBar, & StExBar, or Explorer replacements like xplorer2, XYplorer or FreeCommander already offer.

They are actually talking about xplorer2 among others. Many comments also are referring your lovely tool.

[Kilmatead]

As long as your banker realises that there's a big difference between 0.45 and 0.45%... 0.45 means .45 out of 1.00 or 45 out of 100 or 4,500 out of 10,000 (that is, almost half). However, 0.45% means .45 out of 100, or 45 out of 10,000 (or far less than half). Using decimal points with percentage marks has been the bane of many a student misunderstanding a simple question on a final exam crafted by a trixter professor.

Your banker might not want to open that bottle of Slivovitz just yet.

We'll also note that by "explorer-enhancements", they include more subtle things like Classic Shell (the explorer.exe extension part of it) which merely makes small (if useful) changes, rather than a full-on replace-me-arse-and-pump-up-me-tits approach like x2.

[nikos]

let's say that there are a billion computers in the world, times .45% = 4500000. I estimate that there could be something like 1,000,000 computers worldwide with xplorer2 (642447 mentioned in download.com), so the figures add up.

sadly for my bank account either there's only a handful of users downloading over and over again, or an otherwise mathematical fault prevents my $ balance from amounting to anything spectacular

[Kilmatead]

Considering there's only 7 billion people on the planet (and most of them couldn't afford a pencil never mind a calculator), you're overestimating the practical number of computers a bit. However, if you insist on 4,500,000 as a starting point, you have to eliminate the users (or even downloads) of... well, hundreds of other programmes, such as Dopus, XY, etc, as well as all the minor ones which comprise some form of shell-extension (the article is a tad vague, as you noted). You would also have to include any programme that has any impact on the physical desktop namespace at all, since that is a component of explorer, so theoretically something as massively-downloaded (yet not quite function-orientated) such as WindowBlinds could be counted.

And then you include, or rather exclude (as they state), the number that aren't especially used (and downloads which were uninstalled)... add in the weirdness of piracy... ("774,651 active users on the backs of just 14 legal user licenses")

I can't guess at the maths, but your optimistic "quarter-share" of a questionable 4,500,000 just got a whole lot more questionable.

Besides, when most people use their computers to solve these kind of important problems, exactly how much faith in the number of power-users could even you possibly have?