But if you want to know how the InDesign user base divvies up, at Rorohiko we have fairly significant, up to date information - further down, I'll share with you some usable percentages and graphs for the month of March 2011.
The clue is in our web server logs. We watch downloads of our APID ToolAssistant for InDesign plug-in, and that tells us a lot (http://www.rorohiko.com/apidtoolassistant).
Here's how it works. APID ToolAssistant in itself does not do anything obvious for the end-user, but in order to use one or more of our extensive range of plug-ins, users need to install APID ToolAssistant on their computer. Each user needs to install APID ToolAssistant only once per installed version of InDesign. Every month we get a few hundreds of downloads of APID ToolAssistant.
What makes APID ToolAssistant unique as a market probing mechanism is that we still support versions of InDesign as far back as InDesign CS - we cover the whole range of CS, CS2, CS3, CS4 and CS5.
On top of that, our downloads are separated - instead of one single download, we provide separate downloads for each platform and each version - 10 downloads in total - so we can monitor each platform/version combination separately.
In March 2011, we had 1548 downloads - and these were separated up as shown below.
To paraphrase the graphs below in words: Mac and Windows are about even, about 10% of all users are still using CS and CS2 and about 30% of all users is still on CS3 or below. Finally, CS5 is slightly ahead of CS4.
P.S. If this info is interesting to you, contact consulting@rorohiko.com - there's more where that came from!
| Downloads of APID ToolAssistant in March 2011 | ||||
| Mac, CS | 41 | 3% | ||
| Mac, CS2 | 46 | 3% | ||
| Mac, CS3 | 130 | 8% | ||
| Mac, CS4 | 236 | 15% | ||
| Mac, CS5 | 363 | 23% | ||
| Win, CS | 42 | 3% | ||
| Win, CS2 | 51 | 3% | ||
| Win, CS3 | 135 | 9% | ||
| Win, CS4 | 257 | 17% | ||
| Win, CS5 | 247 | 16% | ||
| Total | 1548 | |||
| Downloads of Mac APID ToolAssistant in March 2011 | ||||
| CS | 41 | 5% | ||
| CS2 | 46 | 6% | ||
| CS3 | 130 | 16% | ||
| CS4 | 236 | 29% | ||
| CS5 | 363 | 44% | ||
| Total | 816 | |||
| Downloads of Windows APID ToolAssistant in March 2011 | ||||
| CS | 42 | 6% | ||
| CS2 | 51 | 7% | ||
| CS3 | 135 | 18% | ||
| CS4 | 257 | 35% | ||
| CS5 | 247 | 34% | ||
| Total | 732 | |||
| Downloads of APID ToolAssistant in March 2011 | |||||
| Mac | 816 | 53% | |||
| Windows | 732 | 47% | |||
| Total | 1548 | ||||
