Re: FLASH: [RESPONSE] Recent Flash Player Release

[Eric J. Wittman]

Ken Sherwood writes:


[[(1) Why was the 25/20 player not withdrawn from public distribution

immediately upon Macromedia's awareness that it is defective? Think it

through, and you will discover that the release of a new player will *not*

erase the existence of how-many thousands of bad ones! Are we supposed to

design around these players? You keep pumping them out, even today.]]


Understand your frustration here Ken. We experience the same frustration

when Netscape, AOL and Microsoft ship varying plug-in APIs, JavaScript

implementations, and JavaVMs for their browsers compounded on top of the

variances in flavors of Windows, MacOS, Solaris, Linux and IRIX. Challenging

that, we have worked very hard to ensure our developers that our features to

be identical across all those platforms and browsers. The development

minefield becomes larger as these types of issues compound in various

releases.


We discovered the problem last week and had a properly fixed and QAed bits

within a week. Once the proper sign offs have been made, we will release the

updated players this week. I think you will find our process very thorough

and prompt.


The Players were not pulled for two reasons: (a) the released players had

features/fixes that outweighed those of previous releases (b) the fix was

able to be quickly applied and tested for a thorough and quick release

cycle.


[[(2) How many thousands of these players have been released to the public

since December 6, 1999? How many were released since MM's awareness of the

problem?]]


The 4.0r20 Macintosh and 4.0r25 Windows Flash Player releases have been

shipping from the Macromedia Download Center since 12/15/99. I don't have

the official numbers off-hand, and would be more than happy to get them, but

I would estimate around 20-30 million downloads, not successful installs,

occurred during that period. Problems with the download numbers, and why we

usually don't give them out, is that this doesn't actually track a users

successful installation. We successfully track this information through

third party surveys such as the one done by NPD Online. Based on those

results, you can estimate that about 50% of those folks successfully

installed the player.


>> (2a) And, more to the point, what percentage of Flash 4 Players that are

out there are of the 25/20 variety?


Again, just an estimation, but I would assume 10-15 million viewers with a

successful installation of the 4.0r20 Macintosh and 4.0r25 Windows versions

of Flash Player. I will have more information at hand in a few days.


Thus said, this issue effects approximately 4-7% of web viewers who are

viewing Flash 4 sites specifically using the load variable feature. All of

this is assuming that these numbers are accurate and the holidays did not

throw the download rates off.


To help support you further Ken, please forward me the Flash sites you have

developed so that our QA team can incorporate into our testing matrix. The

team wants to ensure that this issue is resolved to developers satisfaction.


Cordially,

Eric J. Wittman

Senior Product Manager, Flash

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