Flash Player Downloads, Installs, and Number Crunching

I’m always checking the Adobe Flash Player version penetration table. Emmy Huang, one of the product managers for Flash Player, posted this interesting article on her blog on how Adobe reaches those numbers and what they mean.

“We have an internal dashboard application to track the general ‘health’ of Flash Player downloads and installs, and it can chart the data daily, weekly, monthly, etc. It uses XML feeds of our server log data from Akamai, our current CDN. The dashboard is useful in helping us 1) to understand our traffic so we can try to optimize things like install success rate, and catch problems with our installers or CDN delivery in a matter of days, and 2) get a sense of where our penetration might be in the penetration study in the next wave. The penetration study is only run once a quarter, and it’s hard to wait three months to know where we’re at. “