Curious about status of WWT

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Starbuck Posted: 10-05-2009 12:15 AM

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I own a small business providing custom development services for businesses. It's not "satisfying" work but we do what's necessary to keep the doors open. While I have a strong background in astronomy, the only reason I got into I.T. was that I always thought it would be difficult to pay the bills on the salary of an astronomer.

But WWT offers a possiblity to do something I love using skills that I have - specifically, using the WWT API to help people discover the universe. As wonderful as WWT is, I have to ask a couple questions which I hope people here can help me to answer:

1. I can't write cool projects with WWT for free. Where can I find people/companies who want to make use of WWT and pay people to make their visions a reality?
2. There are of course various business models for generating revenue. You can create a cool utility for people to fly around the universe, and as popularity grows there should be advertisers paying for the eyeballs. That model isn't as solid as it used to be but it's not dead yet. So has anyone proposed an application using WWT that seems like it would be a really hot thing - but someone just needs to code and publish it?
3. Microsoft isn't making such a big deal out of WWT. I'm guessing that's because the market for astronomy isn't as big as it might be for something like maps of Earth. But what sort of applications has Microsoft envisioned using these tools?
4. I'm sorry to say, but this part of the website has not yet attracted a critical mass of people. Popularity here can be measured by some number of forum postings per year. Where is everyone? Is this just the wrong forum? Where are the people raving about what they can do here, what they want to do here, and where are the people who can provide some vision about how the tools can be used? I'm willing to some extent to "build it and hope they will come" but there has to at least be a "they" first.
5. Why isn't there a blog or wiki just for WWT? No interest?

As you can see, I'm concerned about where this project is going, but I absolutely love what's been done, and if I just knew that I wouldn't lose my home providing free or low-cost solutions I'd be happy to do so.

If this isn't the right place for this discussion, please let me know where I can find a more active community.  I'm trying to match supply and demand. Without demand there will be no supply, and with no supply (of useful solutions) WWT may not live long or prosper.

Thanks!

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Jonathan Fay replied on 10-26-2009 2:55 PM

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We have really only advertised this site as a community support forum, we also have direct Microsoft support thru our website.

We currently have had more that 2.5 million users install and use the WWT client successfully, as well as more that 50 million visitors to the website who have viewed tour videos or gotten information on WWT. We see a huge amount usage every day so we know people are using WWT.

For such a large base and the traffic, we have had a relatively good luck with support issues. It had for the most part installed and run without problems on a vast majority of user machines, so there is not as much need for support from the forums. Since we also have support thru our website and try to answer every contact and resolve support questions (free support for a free product, wow. Who does that!) it reduces the need for users support.

We are a not-for-profit project and are not ad supported, so we have a relatively small team and no budget for advertising in traditional media.

That said, we originally thought the audience for WWT was 10 to 20 thousand amateur and pro astronomers, and hoped some educators would come as well, so the response to WWT is actually quite amazing and as astronomy specific applications we have a huge installed base of users.

I wish we had the resources and time to blog about WWT, but we are all so busy working on the product and supporting it! We really should do more to toot our own horn, and we have been very active in the core astronomy and education field, attending conferences and showing WWT at universities and schools, but we need more help to get the word out.

For starters we should bring a higher profile to get more users using the forums here. Not just for product support but for using the product for education, outreach and research.

Jonathan