It was very early, and we were still like beta or alpha stage, and so we started receiving a ton of download. The server became overloaded, and that's when I realized that this had a huge market.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Then people started using it more and more and it became the most downloaded software on the internet.
We realized we had high-volume marketplace as a platform. Anyone can come in and buy with a subscription.
A lot of it had to do with when it's released and what's out in the marketplace, what's its competition.
It's actually not unlike Google at that stage of development. They had an up-and-running site. It wasn't losing very much money, it wasn't making very much money, but it was growing.
I remember when AOL was small and they were growing like mad. Consumers were coming on in droves because they made it easy to connect to the Internet. That was the single biggest innovation of AOL; when grandmas were signing up, AOL had arrived.
We also had good software in the key categories and more focus on the gameplaying capability, so more of the marketing effort was targeted at game customers.
Because Microsoft seems to sometimes not trust customer choice, they salt XP with all these little gizmos and trap doors to get people to try Microsoft stuff. But the reality is that we're downloading more players than we ever have on a worldwide basis.
We saw simply distribution was changing, content, premium content, premium stars; we're going to be able to do more in the world as it evolves.
I think the most difficult thing had been scaling the infrastructure. Trying to support the response we had received from our users and the number of people that were interested in using the software.
I started buying on the Internet quite rapidly, as early as 1995.
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