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Windows Browser Ballot Glitch Cost Firefox 6-9 Million Downloads
nk497 writes "Microsoft's failure to include the EU browser ballot in Windows 7 SP1 cost Mozilla as many as 9 million Firefox downloads, the organization's head of business affairs revealed. Harvey Anderson said daily downloads of Firefox fell by 63% to a low of 20,000 before the ballot was reinstated, and after the fix, downloads jumped by 150% to 50,000 a day. Over the 18 months the ballot was missing, that adds up to six to nine million downloads — although it's tough to tell if the difference has more to do with Chrome's success or the lack of advertising on Windows systems. The EU is currently investigating the 'glitch,' and Microsoft faces a massive fine for failing to include the screen, which offers download details for different browsers to European Windows users, as part of measures ordered by the EU to balance IE's dominance."
When you have data points both before and after the time period you are trying to estimate the values for it isn't extrapolation you idiot. It's interpolation.
They're not interpolating two data points. Have you looked at the charts? There's clearly a strong drop off around the time where the ballot was removed, and a big re-uptake when it was reinstated.
Actually, this is a matter of breach of contract.
Sure, the contract only exists because of the anti competitive monopolistic practices, but yes, ultimately Microsoft agreed to do something and isn't. But the underlying idea that this is like the made up statistics about piracy is a bit misleading. These rules all exists, and these contracts all exist because of microsofts bad behaviour.