I recently saw that Poland passed the 50000 mark on the European part of the map, which made it the first European country to do so. Go Poles!
Download day map of Europe as of Sunday June 8th, 2008.png
Now, it's hard to compare countries, because of the diversity of sizes. Of course the US is leading the way, but they have a population of 300 million people and many of them are connected...
How can we compare countries on a fairer ground? This question has been on my mind for a couple of days, until Ken 'Numerator' Kovash blogged about the community-driven Download Day 2008 Statistics, which has tons of great info.
I wish we could rank countries for the download day by number of connected people. It's not (yet?) possible, but Ehsan Akhgari provides the world with Pledge Rankings by Country Population, which is pretty close to what I want.
I used the data available as of June 9 afternoon (European time), and decided to remove all data points with fewer than 500 pledges, because I (wildly) guess with less than this, the sample is too small and therefore "noise" is too significant[1].
Here are the results:
Rank | Country | Pledge Count | Ratio (%) |
4 | Slovenia | 4666 | 0,232 |
6 | Estonia | 2694 | 0,206 |
7 | Iceland | 622 | 0,204 |
10 | Poland | 68772 | 0,179 |
13 | Netherlands | 22254 | 0,134 |
14 | Malta | 519 | 0,129 |
17 | Norway | 5519 | 0,119 |
19 | Latvia | 2562 | 0,114 |
20 | Lithuania | 3904 | 0,110 |
21 | Albania | 3853 | 0,106 |
22 | Belgium | 1102 | 0,106 |
24 | Denmark | 555 | 0,101 |
25 | Portugal | 10687 | 0,100 |
26 | Finland | 505 | 0,096 |
27 | Croatia | 4315 | 0,096 |
30 | Singapore | 3784 | 0,082 |
31 | Chile | 13231 | 0,080 |
32 | Spain | 31446 | 0,078 |
33 | Switzerland | 5871 | 0,077 |
34 | Canada | 2538 | 0,076 |
36 | Hungary | 7471 | 0,075 |
37 | France | 47378 | 0,074 |
38 | New Zealand | 2964 | 0,071 |
39 | Ireland | 2909 | 0,070 |
41 | Italy | 40367 | 0,069 |
42 | Sweden | 5677 | 0,063 |
43 | Bulgaria | 4417 | 0,061 |
45 | Austria | 4915 | 0,060 |
46 | Israel | 4126 | 0,058 |
47 | United Kingdom | 35268 | 0,058 |
48 | Uruguay | 1921 | 0,055 |
49 | Greece | 5821 | 0,054 |
50 | Taiwan | 11829 | 0,052 |
The conclusion is that the small countries are leading the way. Why is that? I had an Eureka moment on Friday while discussing this with a journalist in London. It suddenly came to my mind that smaller countries are more likely to adopt Firefox than Internet Explorer since Microsoft was not interested in addressing the needs of what they considered as too small and not valuable markets. And I think that, to a certain extent, because localization of an application (in this case Windows+IE) has a fixed cost that is unlikely to be recouped on a small population. With our open-source approach, where Mozilla empowers local users, the cost of covering one more locale is limited. This means that our Open-Source nature actually gives us a head-start to cover some territories... while the quality of the product - along with the word of mouth - does the rest!
Notes
[1] I totally suck at statistics, so please correct me if what I write does not make sense.