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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."
Sorry guys, the "Pro-Microsoft Press" is as much a straw-man shibboleth as "Main Stream Media's Liberal Bias". Give me a break!
How many analysts out there saw the Zunes Microsoft unveiled last fall and actually predicted a success? I'm sorry, I call BS, along with the claim that the iPod created the market for HD-based players. HD-players existed long before the iPod, and anyone who remembers the lawsuits involving the Diamond Rio knows that the path to iPod's success was oiled with the blood of its competition.
I'm not saying the iPod didn't create a huge demand, and grab a large part of the exploding market, but let's not exaggerate things here.
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!
During the 1980s, the computer trade press ran top-forty-like software sales ranking charts. About a year after the release of Lotus 1-2-3, it occupied #1 slot and did so, regularly as clockwork, month after month. It became a unchallenged truism that 1-2-3 was the best-selling software title, perhaps of all time.
Gradually, it transpired that this simply wasn't true. The best-selling software title was, in fact, AppleWorks, a spreadsheet/word processor/"database" for the Apple II line.
What had happened was very simple. Apple sold AppleWorks directly. The only place you could buy it off the shelf (which at that time was still an important sales channel) was at an Apple dealer. That AppleWorks outsold 1-2-3 should not have been much of a surprise, because it was much cheaper, and because Apple dealers frequently included in it attractively-priced bundles.
But of the published figures were based on sales by Corporate Software, Incorporated. Since AppleWorks was never sold by Corporate Software or any other third party, it was literally off the charts.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I'd like to see this become required for all those choosing to write in the field of tech journalism, be they pundits, journalists, bloggers, thinktank members or any other name.
:-) ]
[ The examples were fun, too - Microsoft, Walmart, RIAA and the 70s? I thought "one of these things is not like the others"
You're not going to get rid of the pop music & network television are you ?
I don't think you realize how long it took to get that automated babysitter working like it does.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
That AppleWorks outsold 1-2-3 should not have been much of a surprise, because it was much cheaper, and because Apple dealers frequently included in it attractively-priced bundles.
This qualifies AppleWorks as being one of the most distributed pieces of software, but doesn't really qualify it as being one of the most sold pieces of software. For something to be "sold", it must be "bought"; and for something to be "bought", there must be a deliberate action ("hey, I want that"), not just a grudging acceptance ("in order to get X, which I want, I have to agree to have Y and Z, which are utterly useless garbage").
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
The most interesting part of both articles was:
====
In the final quarter of 2007, Apple earned $7.1 billion in revenue, compared to Microsoft's $12.5 billion in total revenue. Yes, that's right, Apple brought in more than half as much money as Microsoft, despite Windows owning 98% of the PC market.
Even stripping Apple of its iPod revenues, which PC pundits love to do, the company still earned $4.4 billion on its Macintosh business, over a third as much Microsoft brought in from its entire Windows, Office, and server operations combined. Apple's 2% of the PC market doesn't seem so small anymore.
Of course, Microsoft actually lost a lot of money on all of its consumer electronics products, so looking at profits, Apple earned $1 billion compared to Microsoft's total $3.4 billion in profit.
====
Now, I don't know why he chose only the fourth quarter, but it's going to make me go back and look at the numbers for 2004-2006, because if that's a trend it's a very interesting one.
Paul
http://www.pauldrobertson.com
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Sorry guys, the "Pro-Microsoft Press" is as much a straw-man shibboleth as "Main Stream Media's Liberal Bias". Give me a break! How many analysts out there saw the Zunes Microsoft unveiled last fall and actually predicted a success?
Shibboleth, I'm not sure what you mean by that.
Straw man, I understand but did not see one in the article. They were careful to attribute the source of pro-Zune/M$ buzz to several very misleading stories by NPD and Steve Ballmer. They then flay those stories to show how they are misleading.
do we really need a pro-mac blog to provide a multi-part essay on why the Zune is not a success?
Sure, Zune tanked but that's in part because of bloggers tweezing reality from BS. Microsoft made a second rate device and tried to push it as "the best ever" and likely to succeed because of M$'s usual market might. When it did not sell because everyone knew it was a turd, they made up numbers to say it was selling. Because of the net, Zune has the reputation and sales it deserves.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Can we please have an own category for roughly drafted stories?
They are sometimes interesting but for the most part I would like to ignore them for being outright false and so strongly biased that they smell like rotten apple for miles.
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.
* * * *
All my life, I always wanted to be somebody. Now I see that I should have been more specific.
--Jane Wagner
That "however" doesn't just make any sense. In terms of marketshare of computers, Apple is tiny. How does saying that the PC market is a subset of a larger market have any impact on the truthfullness of the previous paragraph? All that means is that the Mac's tiny slice of the market looks even smaller when you incorporate consumer electronics into your definition of the market.
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!
It's possible a PC may cost more than a Mac to maintain, but 5 times more? I work in design, so I've been around both Macs and PCs in a professional environment for quite a few years now. In that period of time our Macs have been replaced far more often than PCs. In the 8 years I worked with this one company Macs were replaced 5 times. They started with old Power PCs, moved on to first generation iMacs, hoping to save some money. Those were replaced in about a year by G3s, then came 2 generations of G4s and most recently Intel-based Macs.
In that same period of time the PCs have been replaced 2 to 3 times. The first upgrade in the same period of time was for IBM machines. Maybe 3 or 4 years later they were replaced by Dells and some of those were replaced by more recent Dell machines. Interestingly there are still a handful of those old Machines around the office being used, not on a regular basis, but they're around. The old Macs are all long gone.
I suppose on a per machine basis a Mac is cheaper. Macs aren't held onto as long and they aren't really upgraded. Many of the PCs in the office saw at least one OS upgrade, at first from Windows NT to 2000, and then to XP.
In the design industry, which is one of the biggest users of Macs, this is quite common. Design companies replace their machines quite often. They often have no choice, and for exactly the problems that article claims afflict PCs.
Apple doesn't extent any support for old systems. It doesn't offer any support for any old products. Once an Apple product has been replaced by a new model you're out of luck. Of course, there's a good support community out there for older Apple devices, but Apple can't take credit for that. Anyone running OSX 10.3 or older wont be getting any updates any time soon.
Older Macs don't run more recent versions of Mac OSX very well. I've experienced this first hand. Even a 3 year old Mac can have difficulty running OSX 10.4 consistently well. A 3 or 4 year old PC can handle XP with no problems at all. Vista is the exception. But then Macs had similar problems when OSX was released.
And then there are the countless times I've been unable to run applications because they were coded for a more recent version of OSX than I was running. And I don't get backwards compatibility people claim Windows lacks and Macs support.
Even with the OS9 environment in OSX old applications don't necessarily run, and that's assuming that environment is even installed. In Windows I can even run many DOS-era applications.
Old Macs are difficult to maintain without the afore mentioned Apple community. Old PCs are exceedingly easy to maintain and similar support communities exist. And why is resale important? I can't think of anyone who's ever sold an old computer. I've seen a lot more interest in old PCs than old Macs which nobody wants if they're 4 or 5 years old. I believe, however, that PCs have a low resale value. PCs are much cheaper than Macs, why spend the money on an old PC when for not too much money a person can buy a new one.
The article also puts forward a few assumptions they can't really prove. One more absurd one being that most PC users will go out and buy a new PC instead of having the current one services. I'
I'm guessing you mean hypocritical rather than hypocrite, but I'm not sure because I can't see a conflict between those two statements...
the single largest platform for distributing digital media, who locks down its devices so that only they may sell content for those devices.
- Well, not quite, you can load media from just about anywhere onto 'those devices' (assuming you mean ipods). They also have their own source (iTMS) that *does* only work with iPods, but hey - that's the same as all their competitors, and why shouldn't they offer that additional service ?
while promoting the image that they are empowering users with superior software and literally changing the world.
- The software that every Mac comes with does indeed genuinely add value to the average person's computing experience. The whole "changing the world" thing is more about letting people who *aren't* technical (and here I usually envisage my sister) getting more out of their computers, by employing good design, and paying attention to details that others overlook.
To give the traditional anecdotal "evidence", my sister flew into florida, found an open WiFi network at the airport, and video-conferenced me (using iChat) here in CA, all with the standard s/w that comes with the machine. Her boyfriend bought her a PC notebook for her birthday last year (in October). When I mentioned (close to Xmas) that that was a shame, because I had been going to buy her a Macbook, she said "oh, no, please get me the Macbook. One of my friends has one, and it's so much easier to use than mine". One Macbook (and somewhat annoyed boyfriend
We've even done a 3-way chat (her in Germany, my parents in the UK, and me in CA), which was pretty cool... so I dunno about changing the world in general - that's a nice goal. It certainly changed *her* world, and for the better.
So, even if both of your premises were true (the first isn't, as explained above), I can't see why Apple should be "hypocrite"; the two statements simply don't have any bearing on each other.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
"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.
Thank you Samuel Clemens :)
The insults you made were interesting. Little substance, overly personal, contributed nothing to the point, and made the assumption of personal superiority based on decisions made in the consumer market. Very Apple fan.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
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.
Back then, many people still hated IBM, because it was the 'big monopoly' computer company that had reigned in power for decades. Plus, IBM introduced OS/2 along with the PS/2 line and Microchannel in such a way as to recapture the market and kill the cloners. Lots of us were very skeptical of IBM for that reason. Similar to the way that lots of people are skeptical of Microsoft (or Apple, or any other 'big company' pushing their product with hype and marketing fluff.)
Part of the reason OS/2 floundered while Microsoft's OS succeeded is that OEMs didn't want to bundle OS/2, and for good practical reasons. For ever unit sold with OS/2 on it, Compaq had to give a sizeable amount of the sale to IBM in the form of licensing for the software. IBM was a competitor of theirs in the hardware market. By going with Microsoft, they weren't required to hand off money for ever unit sold to a competitor, as Microsoft wasn't involved in the hardware market.
There are other factors, as well, in the success of Windoze over OS/2. But many of them are never mentioned, it's just 'big evile Microsoft against poor IBM' which is, frankly, a pathetic distortion of history.
Roughly Drafted has had a madman's war with the Zune since its announcement. Look through the archives of this blog, it's like an anti-Microsoft/pro-Apple Mein Kampf. Why do we keep treating this as fact? The Zune is just a (actually fairly-decent) MP3 player... why has it generated such a massive battery of fanatical FUD? The fact that the Zune had so much rambling consumer backlash from Apple-fans will actually help sell them to anti-scenesters.
Here's a viral/word-of-mouth marketing standpoint-
There's been a trend lately with teenage boys, high-schoolers, purchasing Zune's instead of iPod's. Why? Because they're more straight-forward functional and masculine, but have the same Scene-feeling. It doesn't take a marketing rocket scientist to figure out that iPod's are sort of effeminate. What Microsoft has is a solid product that will slowly ride into the mainstream on the shoulders of masculine insecurity. All it takes is a couple generations, focus, and patience. The Zune instantly gobbled up a chunk of the market share on pure 'wtf'- I imagine that as long as the Xbox camp is behind this product, they'll gain market share continuously over the next several years and product revisions.
My standpoint:
A couple weeks ago, I rode a train for a few hours, watching episodes of The Office on my Zune- I can even watch anime because the screens so clear I can read subtitles. I carry it with me every day and listen to it quite frequently on long walks and runs. The thought of getting an iPod instead never crosses my mind, especially since I make full use of the Zune Pass for subscription music- I couldn't afford it. I purchase all my music in non-DRM MP3 from Bleep.com and rent music from Zune. So, I guess that would make it a Consumer Product, not a satanic cancer.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
- 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
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Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...