Please 'scuse me if the following's off-topic for the board... it's not the type of "technical analysis" that's often here on Silicon Investor.... ;)
Larry wrote, in part: "I am constantly on the web and I saw more Shockwave sites in early 1996 than I do now." One way to quantify this is to go to the HotBot search engine (www.hotbot.com), choose the "Media Type" option, and enter the ".dcr" extension as the search term. Today this turned up about 14,000 web pages. I haven't combined this with their time-restriction parameters to see how this has changed over time, but I recall awhile ago there were 9000 such pages.
That's for gross pages, but a very important distinction here is among sub-audiences. (Not all with internet access go to all kinds of websites.) The entertainment business seems to have an increasing rate of shocked pages -- I'm sorry I can't quantify this, but new movies and television shows do tend to incorporate rich media, where a business website may not. Much depends on the sub-audience.
Another recent article focused on banner adoption, and the percentage of sites accepting Shockwave ads is about the same as those accepting Java ads. Both, unfortunately, are lower than those who will only take GIF banners, but we're working on some technical issues to improve that. (http://www.internetnews.com/IAR/1997/09/0902-lag.html)
The number of shipping CD-ROMs has in fact increased since the web arrived, although the distribution channels have tightened further and the number of titles attempted has decreased, true. Fortunately the total costs of production and distribution have dropped significantly with the popularity of the web, so the relatively long production cycle for CD-ROMs is no longer the only way to distribute rich interactive content.
I guess the most important point I have here is the notion of sub-audiences for websites. There's not one general mass-market out there for each website, and so different types of websites will have different proportions of text, images, new tags, and extensions. (Again, my apologies if this is off-topic to the board.)
jd |
