Quick, name the most popular Windows utility that customers are willing to pay for. Actually, The VAR Guy isn’t sure if he has the correct answer to that piece of trivia. But here’s an educated guess.
Sure, dozens of Windows utilities died out in the 1990s. (Anybody else remember SoftRAM and Stacker?) But a few mainstream options live on … and one of them has actually surpassed 25 million licenses sold.
It’s Diskeeper, which reorganizes hard drive data — eliminating so-called file fragments — to accelerate load and save times. While Windows includes a rudimentary version of Diskeeper, the full-blown version remains a strong seller in its own right.
The VAR Guy first wrote about the utility in the 1990s while working for Windows Magazine. Here we are a decade later. The VAR Guy has packed on 10 to 30 pounds (depending on which month we speak to him). And Diskeeper continues humming along. NPD Group, a research firm, estimates that Diskeeper has nearly 90 percent market share in the system utility/general disk utility category. Impressive.
And unlike other utility markets, there’s actually some competition in the defrag market. The folks at CRN recently spent about 1,000 words (maybe more) describing alternatives to Diskeeper. Hmmm. Maybe it’s time for The VAR Guy to switch to a feature-writing gig that … pays … by … the … word …
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Jan. 14: 
Wow! 25 million licenses sold. I use DK on my systems and have to say its the most efficient defragger i’ve ever used. the debate on whether to defrag drives or not continues but the fact that so many of the disk maintenance utilities are sold say quite a bit abt the issues of fragmentation.
Well, NPD reports on retail sales and some (not all) distribution channels. There are many articles that question results from NPD as a use for market share. Firms like IDC, Gartner, etc., which report of market shares of various markets, do not have market share numbers on the defrag market.
The 25 million licenses sold is a completely arbitrary and unverifiable number. I know many people and departments within Microsoft, including their high-level technicians, that use PerfectDisk from Raxco (another one mentioned in the article). It is a highly-used defragmenter by major corporations and home consumers (I do not work for PerfectDisk and have no affiliation).
Diskeeper follows the Scientology doctrine (because that’s who runs the company) - put whatever you want out there and if noone calls you on it, it must be true.
While The VAR Guy can’t verify Diskeeper’s numbers they do sound reasonable. This is a product that has been around more than a decade. So to get to 25 million licenses they would need far fewer than 2 million licenses per year since the product launched.
Sounds very possible.
I can see why it has sold so well, atleast in the corporate environment. It is one of the few IT products, that we have deployed and used painlessly.
We have stayed with Diskeeper for quite a few years now at our corporate HQ in Singapore, and it has been a trouble-free experience. My system admins are happy with its administrative options and performance, as are the end-users. Whenever required, Diskeeper tech support was efficient - queries were taken care of quickly and with a minimum of fuss. Highly recommended!
P.S. For a short while, during testing of a non-critical auxiliary network, we evaluated defragmentation solutions from other vendors, and we were not pleased with the relative lack of support and the compatibility/performance issues that cropped up.
Regards,
Alfred Lim
Singapore
Yes, possible. But they started this tactic a couple years ago at about 15 million. So now they’re at 5 million copies a year. Why stop there - would expect them to say 10 million in the coming year - who’s to argue…
I am surprised at your choice. I would have expected WinZip to be the winner!
Hmmm. WinZip would have been a great choice. But The VAR Guy was thinking more of an app that improves system performance. Also, do people actually pay for WinZip enhancements or do they just rely on the freeware/shareware versions?
The philisophies or beliefs that pple in a company follow have nothing to do with the performance of its product on our systems! This kind of a personal attack on the company almost as a final resort sounds extremely silly. When we are talking about a product or its features, why bring in stuff thats absolutely nothing to do with it!?
Because they’ve been caught in outright lies to me and my company. It’s not a personal attack, it was a comment based on my experience with them. It’s no “final resort” - again, a comment based on my company’s (and others) experiences with them. If they lie about other things, then it may have something “to do with it.” Maybe not…
The defragmenter is our topic of interest ( atleast mine ) and i would agree with Alfred on the experience with DK. I have been extremely happy with its performance as well as the techsupport team as compared to some of the other defrag products in the market ( both freeware and paid ones)
Actually, the topic was number of licenses sold. But that’s great, I’m glad it has worked out for you and Alfred.
Gentleman,
I am a representative of Diskeeper Corporation. Allow me to shed some light on this matter.
NPD’s market share figures are based on unit sales through distribution. Simple and clear. We cannot control such numbers. They are what they are and are verifiable through point of sale reports. (I even had to get formal permission to quote them).
As for 25 million licenses sold, it’s not even a stretch. We’ve been selling Diskeeper since 1986 (21 years). It was the best-selling third party software product of all time for DEC computers (per Dave Cutler, author of DEC’s VMS operating system, who also went on to author Windows NT). Add to that fact the 100+ Channel events that we do yearly to keep in touch with VARs, and it should be no surprise that we are also the market leader in the Windows platform.
We deliver increased performance and reliability. If we did not, we would not be around any longer (as the VAR Guy so correctly pointed out in the intro of his blog). But the fact is, we do. And therein lies the explanation of why the VAR Guy refers to us as the Most Popular PC Utility Ever.
Derek De Vette
VP Public Affairs
Diskeeper Corporation
for someone “not affiliated”, Jon, you sure know alot about marketing and tactics used over the course of several years by some software company.
if you’re in IT, I can understand being familar with white paper publishers, but where does all this info about NPD come from? and whats with all the wishy-washy marketing-ish statements like “many articles” and “been caught in outright lies”, and “others experience”. As with most marketing, lots of words and no facts. You sure you don’t work in marketing?
if there were lies you should mention them to help out the rest of us, otherwise it just lloks like childish, anonymous internet-forum garbage.
Given I don’t keep up with all this marketing crap (who really cares anyways), I did the only thing any self respecting IT guy would when I need help, I google’d it. diskkeeper had 5.6 million hits to perfectdisks 785k. Doing the math, not my strong suit, that puts diskkeeper at 88% of the web noise. Probably not scientific but the percent is pretty close to their claim.
By the way, winzip had 15 million hits on Google! I’m with Jeff on this one.
Guys, I’m done with this - I wasn’t looking to stir up any debate, I was just commenting initially when I read the Var Guy’s article. I’m with Jeff and Hawaiit too on Wizip.
I have no doubt Diskeeper is the market leader in defragmentation. My question was with the numbers they put out.
I know about the “tactics used over the course of several years” because I’ve dealt with them going back to the VMS days. As for information to “help out the rest of” you, I would say this: If you are in a corporate environment and doing an evaluation, just do your due diligence - ok course they’re all sales people, but ask for backup. Areas that we questioned and found to be suspect (hopefully not “garbage”) include:
- Microsoft relationship (yes, I know they originally worked with MS on its defrag)
- actual performance statistics - do YOUR benchmarks
- actual defrag results - check ALL the stats, including what is shown and NOT shown
- check resource consumption
- check user IT and professional user groups
Market share with NPD was just one thing they put out to us, and as we looked at everything and talked to other users, we dug a litte deeper. You can google “npd numbers misleading” and see some interesting things. My only point regarding this was that NPD is good at some things, but not all. “It’s not even a stretch” - I don’t know what that means…I do know that DEC computers are not PCs, so that’s there’s part of the number that’s being represented.
Anyway, I’m done. Go use Diskeeper if you want, it makes no difference to me.
Peace and love….
Jon
Diskeeper is a Scientology front, in case you have not heard.
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