"Market Share" "Installed Base" and Consumer Electronics

redrum writes "Analysts and reporters like to talk about market share statistics, but the conclusions they draw are often misleading, RDM reports. Market Share Myth 2007: iPod vs Zune and Mac vs PC takes a look at how numbers are used to paint grossly inaccurate portrayals of the market share of the Zune among iPods, and alternatively the Mac among PCs. A follow up article, Market Share vs Installed Base: iPod vs Zune, Mac vs PC demonstrates how the conventional wisdom of market share reporting can be turned upside down by simply comparing what vendors actually sell. An eye opening, in depth look at the real numbers behind PCs, music players, and console games."

Comments

Re:Who are YOU?

[0xdeadbeef]

There is a debate here?

I read an Apple commercial framed in the recontextualizing of sales data to refute an imaginary horde of straw man analysts. It's all a conspiracy, man, designed to keep Steve Jobs down!

The sugar water, changing the world reference might be too subtle for the johnny come lately Mac user, but it refers to the hypocrite nature of Apple, a hardware company positioned as the single largest platform for distributing digital media, who locks down its devices so that only they may sell content for those devices, while promoting the image that they are empowering users with superior software and literally changing the world.

The first article is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

The first article complains that *all* individual PC makers' market shares pale in comparison to the full market. But it elides the real point, which is that all those PC makers' machines are Windows machines. The Windows vs. Mac OS comparison is the one being made, not Dell vs. HP, which users don't care about.

Re:Ahhh, roughly drafted

[rakslice]

WTF is a 3.5" laptop hard drive?

Please get your facts straight _before_ you post.

Re:Ahhh, roughly drafted

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF are you saying what has already been said twice already? Please read the other followups _before_ making redundant posts.

Re:"Myth busting" with undocumented assumptions?

[arminw]

...I can purchase at least two PCs versus one Mac of comparable specs.....

I'd like you or anyone who reads this, to demonstrate this assertion with vendor links, prices and specifications. Perhaps a no name, white box desktop system might be half price of an iMac, but one of these would not come close in features and cost only half of what iMacs sell for. As for laptops and workstation class systems, Macs actually cost less, or at least the same as an equivalent other name brand computer. Of course, it is possible to buy a stripped down Windows box which will be fine for simple email and web surfing stock reports. Apple doesn't sell anything other than full featured multi-media hardware with superb software to match. Anyone who doesn't want this capability should not spend the extra for it and therefore should not buy an Apple computer, any more than a car buyer in Alaska needs and air-conditioner.