After yesterday’s post (expanded upon by Nathan Doughty here), I tried a few web searches to find out how many users Autodesk claims for Buzzsaw.
In November 2002, Autodesk claimed to have "more than 65,000 users"; this grew to 105,000 users from 750 companies (according to an April 2005 article), then 125,000 last month (November 2005) – a figure given by Autodesk’s Carol Bartz at the recent Autodesk University (see GIS User article).
I still think such numbers need to be substantiated. Do they, for example, include users who signed up to use Buzzsaw for nothing in the early days? Does it include users who are using locally hosted versions of Buzzsaw? Are these active users or people who have been registered as potential users but who may never actually use the solution? (There was a problem with some ASPs whose user base numbers were based on the sum total of all the employees of all the companies that signed up for the service; eg: if an ASP signed up 100 customers, each with 1,500 potential users, it could claim 150,000 users even if the actual number was far less.) Perhaps someone closer to Buzzsaw, Autodesk and/or the US market can enlighten me?
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