"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

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.)