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"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."
The blog entry didn't say that iPod created the hard drive market, it claimed that iPod expanded the market. The blog entry was pretty clear in stating that there were hard drive players before the iPod.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Put another way, do we really need a pro-mac blog to provide a multi-part essay on why the Zune is not a success? I mean, this thing is as much a dog as the Apple ROKR!
Actually, that's the Motorola ROKR; it wasn't an Apple product, but merely licensed Apple software. If you had said "Apple Newton" or "Apple Lisa," you'd have made a better point (but not "Apple Pippin," as the Pippin was also intended to be a licensed technology platform and not an Apple product.
Not to mention that revenue !=profit, and that the margins on hardware (Apple) and Software (MS) are *vastly* different.
It's not even really apples to oranges...it's apples to rocks.
You keep refering to "anecdotal evidence" as evidence. It is only evidence that a) a single office has macs with a lifespan that long and b) your family has macs with a lifespan that long. The whole point with anecdotal evidence is that it is not evidence that the lifespan of macs in the marketplace is normally that long.
This announcement was brought to you by the board of pendantic criticism.
PS I've had my PC for about 8 years. It's had a couple of new motherboards, a new case, new harddrives, many processors and several videocards. Does this datapoint prove anything?
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
Old article on Slashdot:
http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/05/06/05/0548225.s html?tid=3
Summary: Software Publisher's Association and other groups estimated in 2005 that 16% of all computer users were on Macs.
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All my life, I always wanted to be somebody. Now I see that I should have been more specific.
--Jane Wagner
It seems obvious that he picked the 4th quarter because Apple had a revenue spike.
Microsoft's Balance Sheet vs. Apple's Balance Sheet
It would appear that over the last five years Microsoft (profit over 5 years: ~$50B) has consistently made quite a bit more money than Apple (~$3.7B) has (and profits at both companies are growing quickly).
I guess his point is that Apple's making money and selling stuff. Which is nice for them, but that's what companies are supposed to do.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
Amusing how RoughlyDrafted sort of misleads with these figures, when he is ranting against other misleading statistics. Based on Wikipedia (disclaimer, but I recall it is basically right from the official reports), Apple had almost half as much revenue as Microsoft in 2006 ($19.3 to $44.2 billion). So yes, as claimed, Apple's revenue is around half that of Microsoft's. But look at net income: $1.73 vs. $12.6 billion - Microsoft makes more than 7 times as much, when measured by net income. So, just as RoughlyDrafted says, partial figures can be misleading.
In this case, the cause of the discrepancy is quite obvious: Microsoft sells a product with zero marginal value - software. This is basically making money from nothing. Apple, on the other hand, makes actual 'real' products, that cost money to make - Macs, iPods.
I'm not sue what article you read. The one I read jumped all over between topics, didn't finish one issue before launching into the next, and included graphs that it didn't even adequately explain. Roughly drafted, indeed.
The blog entry didn't say that iPod created the hard drive market, it claimed that iPod expanded the market.
Expanded isn't really the right word. When the first iPod came along, hard-drive players were using 3.5" laptop hard-drives. Apple found a manufacturer that was about to launch 2.5" drives, and bought 6 months of their entire production, blocking competitors from being able to match their smaller players for the first six months of the iPods life.
On 60% of Microsoft's sales. That is not a good thing for Apple. Microsoft can afford to flat out waste billions of dollars and still have higher operating margins than Apple.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Software has zero marginal cost. The marginal value is whatever someone is willing to pay you for it.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
It was actually other manufacturers using 2.5" drives when Toshiba introduced the 1.8" drive with which Apple used with the iPods.
What, me worry?
Wow, I didn't even know Symantec even makes anto-spyware or the mac, especially since it doesn't exist (for now). And as for Geek Squad, the Best Buys in my city give you a Geek-Squad install thing when you buy a new computer, so I'd assume that after they set up a box in people's homes they realize that the service was quite nice and get them in more often.
Now I dont know about you, but i've never seen a Mac with Symantec installed on it
there. I fixed it for you.
What ? Me, worry ?
"redrum" would appear to be Daniel Eran, the owner of roughlydrafted.com. The people over on digg.com have accused him of spamming Digg with his articles and then using sockpuppet accounts to 'digg' his stories (and only his stories) to get them on the frontpage (or however it works on Digg). When this was found out, he was banned from Digg and he took this personally. In his deluded mind this is a conspiracy against Apple by pro-Microsoft minions. He even has people email Apple asking them to set up a "pro-Apple" competitor to Digg. Daniel Eran is a sycophantic Apple fanboy of the worst kind.
I had a 1st generation iPod and loved it.
Actually, my biggest complaint of the 1st generation iPod was its size and weight. You could put it in a shirt pocket, but you wouldn't want to. Eventually, the hard disk in my 1st gen died after 5 years, so I replaced it with an 8GB nano.
Drinking the Kool-aid refers to a cult whose leader had them drink the poisoned kool-aid and they died. Drinking the Kool-aid means that you believe in the leader on faith, originally from the phrase "don't drink the kool-aid" from the Jonestown masacre.
Sugar-water is Apple specific. When Jobs lured John Sculley from Pepsi, Jobs asked Sculley, "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?"
Hence the Sugar Water and "Change the World" quotes are Apple quotes, and have nothing to do with the Kool-aid quote you are referring to.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
.... but i've never seen a Mac without Symantec installed on it......
Well, I've had 13 Macs since the first mac plus and NONE of them has ever had any Symantec crap installed. The only anti-virus program that ever lived on any Mac was a program called Disinfectant, which was a freebie program. None of the Macs we have now, nor any Mac owners I know have *any* sort of anti-malware software. Macs without all that garbage are still safer than any Windows machine with every anti malware program in existence installed thereon.
The need to install such stuff on a computer is equivalent to having to install seat belts, airbags and anti-lock brakes on a new car. Modern cars should and do come with these from the factory.
Hopefully the need for such expensive, troublesome extra garbage software on Windows machines has been eliminated or at least greatly reduced with VISTA. I ordered a copy of VISTA to try on one of our PCs.
All theory is gray
- PROOF that Roughly Drafted is SPAMMING/Gaming Digg with multiple accounts (97 diggs)
Photographic evidence of AlexaW and RoughlyDrafted gaming Digg just to get moron Daniel Eran's articles to the front page. (Where they promptly get buried for being inaccurate.) Several users who ONLY digg AlexaW's submissions, all of whom signed up in the last 3 weeks. Coincidence? Not a chance. This needs to be stopped immediately. More on Daniel Eran:TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...