SOFTWARE PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION SALES DATA PROGRAMS - METHODOLOGIES, COVERAGE AND ASSUMPTIONS

The Software Publishers Association Research Department focuses its sa les research efforts on tracking sales of packaged application softwar e written for the desktop personal computer industry. Quarterly summar ies of the data we collect are issued to the public in the form of sal es press releases. Our goal in this article is to clarify the types of information we collect, the sources used, and the adjustments perform ed on the data available to the public. At the end of this article we discuss the software piracy loss estimation methodology.