Date   : Fri, 08 Jan 1988 17:27:52 GMT
From   : tikal!sigma!bill@beaver.cs.washington.edu (William Swan)
Subject: Re: CP/M Software Market--an interesting note from Micropro

In article <4393@ecsvax.UUCP> tcamp@ecsvax.UUCP (Ted A. Campbell) writes:
>I spoke to folks at Micropro just before Christmas and asked them if they
>had any estimate of the size of the CP/M market. [...] between August and 
>November 1986 Micropro sold 17,000 upgrades to CP/M Wordstar.
>
>Estimates of the number of CP/M machines varies from one and a half to
>two million.  Some of these are out of service, but others have been 
>passed on.  Any one out there have a suggestion as to how we might 
>characterize the size of the CP/M software market?

I think, Ted, that this is your best bet (at least until sombody comes out
with a package that *every* CP/M user will want :-). It's clear that the
CP/M market is larger then 17000, but by how much I wouldn't know.

One can't even assume there are only 17k WordStar users out there. There are
many who, like me, never mailed in the licenses for their old WordStars and 
thus wouldn't have learned about 4.0 (I registered only to get the upgrade).

I know 6 CP/M systems (mine, my mother's, father's, two friends', and my 
boss's [for sale]), but only two of us (my father and I) have bought W*4.0.
One friend doesn't use (or like, Jon?) WordStar, and the other doesn't know 
(yet) about the upgrade.  Based on my experience we could say there are about 
50000 systems active. I don't think that's a very accurate estimate, maybe not
even to order of magnitude. 

I'm not sure we'd do much better if we each listed all the systems we know
(checking to avoid overlaps), and all the upgrades we know. (I would list 
only 5 known machines, because one friend is also on the net, but I would
list two upgrades.) 


-- 
William Swan  {ihnp4,decvax,allegra,...}!uw-beaver!tikal!sigma!bill