Valve has updated its Hardware & Software Survey for January 2014, and the news is once again very good for Microsoft. Apple and Canonical both lost share on Steam’s platform, but Windows 8.1 continues to surge forward.
Here is the January 2014 operating system list for Steam, in order of biggest to smallest share:
Windows 8.1: 10.75 percent
Windows 8: 10.56 percent
Windows 7: 63.04 percent
Windows XP: 6.25 percent
Windows Vista: 4.30 percent
Mac OS X: 3.47 percent
Linux: 0.86 percent
Breaking down the numbers even more, here is how each operating system version fared:
In December, Windows 8.1 overtook Windows XP on Steam. Last month, Windows 8.1 passed the 10 percent market share mark, and combined with Windows 8, the duo passed the 20 percent mark.
In fact, Windows 8.1 was the only Windows version to gain share between December and January. Gamers are by and large moving to Windows 8.1, though given Windows 7′s popularity it will very likely continue to lead for many more months.
Over the last month, Windows 8.1 gained 1.92 percentage points (from 8.83 percent to 1.92 percent) while Windows 8 slipped 0.58 points (from 11.14 percent to 10.56 percent). Windows 7 meanwhile dropped 0.31 points (from 63.35 percent to 63.04 percent), Windows Vista slipped 0.59 points (from 4.89 percent to 4.30 percent), and Windows XP dipped 0.10 points (from 6.35 percent to 6.25 percent).
Microsoft aside, OS X and Linux both lost 0.21 percentage points each. The two platforms ended up with 3.47 percent and 0.86 percent, respectively.
In February, we expect Windows 8.1 will pass Windows 8, and the two will soon pass the 25 percent market share point. As Windows 8.1 continues to eat away at Windows 8, however, it will take quite some time to pass Windows 7 on its own. Next year, Windows 9 will launch and we’ll do it all over again.
Making money on mobile can be a tricky thing. Having ads on your app is an option, but few companies have truly cracked the perfect mobile advertising strategy, so adding ads to your app will likely be an annoying, disruptive experience to the user.
Still, this doesn’t mean having ads on your app won’t make you money; it means you better have an amazing and addictive app. Why? Because it takes a lot of effort for your user to download and start using an app, but very little effort to delete. If your app doesn’t show enough value quickly – you will lose people and they will not come back.
The Israel Mobile Monetization Summit took place a few weeks ago and I went in with the intent of learning all I could about business models on mobile. With the third world skipping the laptop experience due to the prohibitive cost and jumping straight to 3G phones, mobile is becoming a world equalizer – and making money there is the latest challenge.
How do you know when you’re designing a mobile app that’s going to make money? You don’t. You can hope it, you can plan on it, you might even have the world’s best business model surrounding it – but wouldn’t it be better if there were aspects you could look at and judge systematically to see whether the likelihood is better than simply, “Yes, if we have good timing”?
Eric Reiss (not to be confused with Eric Ries of Lean Startup fame) has done just that. Reiss is the CEO and Content Strategist at The FatDUX Group and his focus is on UX. At the core of it, your app has to have true value.
Here are Reiss’ eighteen elements in mobile apps that are signals that an app will do well.
Foundation
Concept
Affordable – Is your app free? That’s pretty affordable. If it’s not free – is it value for money?
Useful – Think Evernote, or an app that turns a picture into a Fax. I don’t use it often, but I need to have it. Games don’t fit here. Unless it’s Lumosity.
Easy to adopt – Is your app easy and effortless to understand and use? As easy as Instagram?
Conditions
Business critical (you need to have for work) – Accounting software would be appropriate here. Games would not.
Addictive – Games aren’t business critical, but they are addictive. Facebook is also addictive, as is my favorite addiction, Pinterest.
Intrinsic value – Is it something that makes you want to master it? Email is a good example here – think Inbox Zero. The ultimate of all goals. (And one I still haven’t reached)
Communication
Platform
Showcase – Blogging, Pinterest, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Dribbble – anything that allows you to show off your work/taste/etc.
Conduit – Enabling something else to happen – Buffer places your posts on various social platforms at the optimal time for your audience. It’s a conduit. Not a final place.
Social system – Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat… a place to be social. To connect with others.
Environment
Well-defined market – Fairly self explanatory, but games for kids is a great example of this
Multi-channel capability – Evernote is probably the best example if this, as they seem to be everywhere online and off
Cross-channel conversion (think games here) – Disney does this well. In Where’s My Water there are other characters and other versions you can buy, as well as levels you can unlock.
Monetization
Quick wins
Incentives – Dropbox is a great example. Getting your friends to join means you AND they get extra free space.
Rewards – Take these actions and get rewarded with points, coupons, virtual goods.
Cross-sales – Again, games do this well. Buy virtual goods or other premium games from inside the app.
Recurring revenue
Subscriptions – Media publications, like the NYTimes, have a subscription model now.
Upgrades – Premium service for Dropbox (example). Freemium model would be an upgrade for recurring revenue.
Scalability – Example, Esty and other marketplaces that charge a small amount per transaction but make their money from scale.
At the end of the day, as far as Reiss’s concerned, “If you’re not solving a problem then you’re creating one.”
Candy Crush Saga, a game I absolutely refuse to even try, has 13 of the 18 characteristics listed. The game’s developer King nailed the addictiveness of this game – and I didn’t even need to check the numbers to know that. I get invited daily by friends on Facebook to play it (I’ve turned off those notifications, mind you, but I still see it on the side.)
Take another example: Toshi, some little-known-in-the-West Japanese game has only six of the elements and Angry Birds has only seven. What Angry Birds did have, that Toshi didn’t, was insanely good timing.
According to Reiss, Rovio came out with a game that used mobile properly before anyone else did and became the darling of Apple. That might also explain why Rovio has only one massive hit. Of course, it really only needs that one massive hit to franchise under.
How does your app compare? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Paul Jarvis is a Web designer and best selling author. He works with the world’s biggest entrepreneurs and Fortune 500 companies. His latest book, Everything I Know, is a no-rules journey through 20 years of freelancing as a creative professional.
Face it. You’re trying to game the system.
Even right now, reading this, you’re hoping there’s some new idea presented that helps you learn a new marketing or promotion tactic to take what you’ve made to the next level.
You’re hoping for the magic pill that will get you in front of more eyeballs, and more importantly, have those eyeballs give you money (if eyeballs had wallets).
Here’s the thing: anytime a specific and proven tactic actually works, it will only last for a short time, and then only for the first few people who use it.
Then they invariably tell others and it gets watered down until everyone is trying the exact same thing and wondering why they aren’t getting results, possibly even paying money to learn what worked for the now-successful early adopter.
Let’s revisit an old friend
MySpace used to be the place for musicians (an easy example because I am a musician who used MySpace). In the beginning, it was easy to build a fan-base on their network, connecting with lots of people quickly and building a following. Some musicians even started huge careers just because they had a lot of MySpace fans.
You created your account, uploaded your music and started friending people. Boom, done.
After a while, promoters and venues were only letting musicians contact them via MySpace to book shows. Eventually, every musician started to use MySpace.
But, as I hope most of you are aware, MySpace died a horrible, lonely death. Sure, it still exists, but do you know even one who person actively uses it? Or a musician that’s used it with any success to build fans or sell records? They hired Justin Timberlake to promote their launch and it still tanked.
Any musician that assumed simply creating a MySpace profile would net them big shows and lots of dedicated fans was shit out of luck.
That’s not a real strategy. It’s a lazy attempt to get out of the hard work of playing shitting venues for 0-5 people, night after night, until they got good enough for people to notice.
Tactic v. Strategy
We all think the latest and greatest tactic to get a bigger audience is going to go so well for us. Except the reason we think it’s going to work is because we just read about it on a popular blog (along with 10,000 other people, thinking the same thing we are). We can’t just set up a MySpace profile and wait for album sales.
We also assume the platforms we use will promote our work for us. If we just have a Kickstarter campaign, we’ll be part of their marketing machine and get the project funded. Stretch goals unlocked!
Or if we put our book on Amazon and make it cheap, it’ll fly off the digital shelves. Bestseller! Oh, you want to buy the movie rights?!
Or if our app is in Apple’s App Store it’ll get featured as soon as it’s approved. One million downloads, what?!
The likelihood of any of these things happening is like winning some sort of marketing nerd lottery.
Lottery winning rarely happens and you certainly can’t hedge your bets on it.
The only way to ensure what you’ve made has the traction it needs to take off is to bring your own people to the party.
That way, if the party needs to change location, everyone’s game to move it elsewhere with you. You can’t stand by the punchbowl and cross your fingers, hoping people show up. You have to invite others.
But before even that, you have to actually make friends and foster relationships. Really, you have to build a following of people that like what you do. People that would benefit from what you’ve made and maybe, just maybe, like it enough to tell other people they know.
There’s no quick tactic or simple way to game the system to build a loyal audience of people who are eager for what you create.
More importantly, you can’t put all your stock into a single tactic — it might not pay off, and even if you’re lucky and it does, you won’t know how long it’ll work.
Tactics come and go.
Tactics get watered down.
Tactics are MySpace profiles.
So, how do you do it?
How do you build 1000 loyal fans? A tribe? A small army?
You have to abstract it out a little, to a point where there are no easy answers. Except that it’ll involve hard and onerous work on your part.
There are no quick hacks, just a lot of time (measured probably in years, not days) put into what you make. You keep working at what you do, constantly doing it better and then showing the people who’ll benefit from that creation.
It might start with one person in your tribe. Or it might start with no people, in which case you have to go back and work harder at what you’re creating and try again.
Once there is at least one person that wants to be part of your following, you have to keep producing something of value for them. And then they’ll hopefully tell someone else. That’s two people now, which means you just doubled your audience. And then you keep working and launching and showing the right people what you’ve made.
Slowly, if the work is good enough and you show it to enough of the right people, more people will start to show up at your party, regardless of its location. They’ll bring eyeballs (the kind with wallets).
Maybe you show people what you’ve made using MySpace (hey, it could make a comeback) or maybe it’s Twitter or SuperSocialX (which doesn’t exist yet, but Justin Timberlake is on call for the promo video). The platform used to promote isn’t important.
The platform can and will keep changing.
What matters is that you’re connecting with your people and building them something they value. So when that platform changes or dies, those people are still willing to follow your party to another location.
Produce work that others find valuable and share it with them.
If you produce something that no one finds valuable, go back and make it better. Then try sharing it with the type of people that could benefit from it.
Otherwise, you’re just posting your music on MySpace and hoping you’ll get lucky.
