PC Data

» see pcdata.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

PC Data was a market research firm in Reston, Virginia, founded in 1991 by Ann Stephens, who had previously been the head researcher at the Software Publishers Association. It did one thing: it collected point-of-sale data from American retailers and turned it into a number. How many copies of this game went out of the door last week. How many copies of this word processor went out last month. Then it sold that number back to the people who had made the software.

The Washington Post in August 1996 called it "the preeminent tabulator of facts and figures of the monthly sales of consumer software in the United States", which is exactly the sort of phrase a company like this wants hanging on its wall. By September 1998 its coverage of the US retail software market had reached 80 percent. It added hardware, and in 1999 it added internet traffic measurement. That last addition is what killed the company.

For about a decade, if you read a games magazine or a press release or an analyst's note, the sales figure in it almost certainly came from here. A publisher announcing a million units was quoting PC Data. A magazine printing the week's ten best sellers was reprinting PC Data. Nobody outside the industry knew the name and nobody inside it could avoid the name.

~ the case file ~

~ how the number was made ~

Retail tracking in the 1990s was a logistics problem wearing a statistics costume. You had to persuade chains to hand over their register data, normalize the formats, weight for the stores that would not play, and publish fast enough that the number was still news. The firms that managed it ended up holding something close to a monopoly on an industry's self-knowledge, which is why PC Data and NPD spent the decade circling each other.

The internet arm worked differently and that difference is what mattered. PC Data Online measured web traffic by installing tracking software on the machines of a recruited panel of users, the same basic method as Media Metrix and NetRatings. Three companies were measuring the same web with the same technique, and one of them held a patent on the technique.

Here is the distance from where I was sitting. These charts counted American cash registers, and in Turkey in those years a great deal of software never went past a cash register at all. It arrived on a burned disc or came down the line at an internet cafe. A number assembled from US point-of-sale receipts was an accurate picture of exactly one market, and that market was not the one I lived in.

~ the march ~

March 2001 took the company apart inside a single month. Early on, NPD Intellect bought PC Data's point-of-sale tracking business, the original half, and folded it into its own market tracking division. Then Jupiter Media Metrix went to court over patent number 6,115,680, which covers tracking the usage of panelists' computers.

PC Data did not fight. It conceded that it had infringed the patent, accepted an injunction, gave up tracking panelists entirely, and transferred the rights to its own @PC Data tracking software to Jupiter. Financial terms were never disclosed. Stephens, by then founder and chairman, put out a statement saying the business would be better served by transitioning customers to a new provider. NetValue and comScore Networks each announced they had agreed to take pieces of the online unit, the client lists and the panel. The company's defunct date is 29 March 2001.

The chart itself had a long afterlife under NPD, and then it did not. In June 2009 NPD stopped giving the weekly top ten PC games list to the press, keeping only the monthly numbers public, and the weekly retail chart that PC Data had invented quietly stopped being a thing anyone could read. By then retail boxes were not where PC games were sold anyway. The question PC Data had been built to answer now lived on download servers owned by the stores themselves, which had no reason to hand the numbers to an outside firm.

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