"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

statistics

[mastershake_phd]

Statistics can make a lot of things seem different than they are. For instance, someone is killed by a falling coconut every 2 days. So you should put helmets on your kids and keep them indoors.

Re:Most interesting part

[heinousjay]

Great idea. We definitely want to spread the message that success is failure in the new economy, comrade.

That's what I used to think

[Solandri]

Sorry guys, the "Pro-Microsoft Press" is as much a straw-man shibboleth as "Main Stream Media's Liberal Bias". Give me a break!

I used to think that until the early 1990s. Windows was still using cooperative multitasking and Linux wasn't mainstream yet, so the only choice for a "real" OS on the PC was OS/2. I'd been following news reports on OS/2 pretty closely. In one issue of a weekly tech magazine, Information Week I think, they had an article titled something like "New version of OS/2 to be delayed." The article went on about how IBM chose to delay it to add some more features. Literally a few pages away there was an article about the new version of Windows titled something like "Chicago to gain new features" (Chicago was the code name for Windows 95). Further in the article it explained that because of the new features, the next version of Windows would be delayed...

Two articles in the same issue of the same trade rag saying pretty much the exact same thing, yet the Microsoft article got a title emphasizing the positive, while the IBM article got a title emphasizing the negative. I couldn't believe it when I first heard it, but I pulled out my copy of the magazine and sure enough it was true. There is a bias among the media out there. It may not be deliberate or even pervasive, but it's definitely there. (Granted Apple may benefit as much if not more from a pro-Apple bias.)

Re:"Myth busting" with undocumented assumptions?

[arminw]

....There is no way the average lifespan of a consumer PC before it gets thrown away is two years......

Most users get a new computer when the existing one will not easily do a new task. Older Windows laptops for example seldom come with wireless capability. Most users do not have the desire nor capability to install a wireless interface. Therefore they'll buy a new computer that has it, if they really want that feature. Macs have always been more complete and therefore slightly more expensive. I bought a Powerbook in 2001 which has wireless networking built in. There were virtually no new Windows machines back them that did. That old machine doesn't do our Photoshop or movie editing and the battery lasts less than an hour, but still makes a great multimedia music and movie player connected to a projector and stereo in the living room. So, the article is right, Macs are useful longer.

Also, old Macs do sell for more on e-bay. That is not anecdotal, but anyone can check e-bay to see that.