[Don Pickett]

From Slashdot: http://www.alliedcomputing.com/default.php?news_id=50

Certainly puts a new spin on things.

[CheesePuff]

But Steve himself said at the latest MacWorld keynote that he is going to get the other 95% to switch to OS X...

[drmcnutt]

Originally posted by CheesePuff:
But Steve himself said at the latest MacWorld keynote that he is going to get the other 95% to switch to OS X...

Apparently Steve hasn't pulled numbers out of thin air. Always interesting, statistical arguements, except where did the "30 hours of research" numbers come from? Goofy.

DRM

[krove]

Most of the stats that are quoted are often yearly sales volume numbers, and of late, Apple's percentage of sales has definitely gone downhill.

[Graymalkin]

Without any references those numbers are a bit unbelievable. A number which strikes a chrod with me in particular is the 11% hardware penetration rate claimed in the article. Sales for the past couple years have been high, high enough to get Apple's sales/year percentage in the top 10 of computer producers. Typically evidensed numbers are that questionable 11 or so percent. Since I don't have the references myself to verify anything the article claims I'm guessing that the author is mistaking recent sales rankings to overall market penetration.

I think the numbers for PCs is really low besides. The US has a huge number of PCs but so do Europe and Asia. If you count all business PCs in the totaly number I'd bet the number of PCs is somewhere double what the article claims. It is no doubt Apple remains a top seller in the industry as a whole and maintains an appriciable presense in the computer market but I think it is a vast overstatement claiming 11% of the totaly PC market. The same goes for the supposed Linux using population of 3 million. That is ridiculous considering most Linux installations at home are dual boot configurations, even if only half of these are dual boots that is only a tiny fraction of the total PC market though they likely make up a large percentage of the group labeled as Unix servers.

The only myth is the journalistic integrity of the article's author, without so much as a single referenced source other than the internet at large it is difficult to believe any part of this article.

[mitchell_pgh]

Originally posted by krove:
Most of the stats that are quoted are often yearly sales volume numbers, and of late, Apple's percentage of sales has definitely gone downhill.

krove... that is just flat out wrong. The number of Apple Computers shipped has remained rather constant over the past four years. We aren't loosing our market, the market is just getting larger.

Think of it this way.


10 years ago, how many computers were there?

let's say it was 10,000 (we all know it was more, but you will see what I'm saying)

of those 10,000 lets say 1000 were macs, that would make it a 10% minority

Now lets say it's 2003 and there are 100,000 and now there are 7000 macs..., that's only 7%

(OH NO, WE ARE LOOSING MARKET SHARE!!!)

[krove]

Ok, I recind my statement as I have no real evidence either way. My point really was that the statistics we hear about most often are sales rates, are they not?

[Superchicken]

while I'd love to believe this article... I think the author is smoking more than the entire population of stoners at my school.

[ratlater]

I think Apple was the number five computer reseller this year. The numbers were just announced. HP is first then Dell, I can't remember #3 and IBM was 4 with about 470,00 units sold. Apple sold 350,000 or somewhere near there.

-matt

[voodoo]

Originally posted by Superchic[k]en:
while I'd love to believe this article... I think the author is smoking more than the entire population of stoners at my school.

I'd love to believe it too

I wonder how he gathered his data and how large the sample size was.

[voodoo]

Originally posted by ratlater:
I think Apple was the number five computer reseller this year. The numbers were just announced. HP is first then Dell, I can't remember #3 and IBM was 4 with about 470,00 units sold. Apple sold 350,000 or somewhere near there.

-matt

That was just for this quarter. The yearly sales are nearly 4x as high.

[Don Pickett]

Originally posted by krove:
Ok, I recind my statement as I have no real evidence either way. My point really was that the statistics we hear about most often are sales rates, are they not?

Part of the reason I posted this article was as a counterpoint to the usual 3% stories. I don't know what Apple's marketshare is, but I doubt it's as low as 3%. My guess is around 8% total, and that's just a hunch.

Anyone remember when IDC was reporting each color iMac as a unique computer so the iMac wouldn't be the best-selling computer in the U.S.?

[wataru]

Pssh, you can use statistics to prove anything. 34% of all people know that.

[The Evener]

Originally posted by Don Pickett:
Part of the reason I posted this article was as a counterpoint to the usual 3% stories. I don't know what Apple's marketshare is, but I doubt it's as low as 3%. My guess is around 8% total, and that's just a hunch.

Anyone remember when IDC was reporting each color iMac as a unique computer so the iMac wouldn't be the best-selling computer in the U.S.?

You're absolutely right to be suspicious of the number game. It's been said that in politics, perception is everything, and I'd say it applies equally to the business of technology.

Besides, Apple has 3% of what? Total shipments? Total purchases? Total units in use, whether one day or five years old? As a case in point, I just downloaded a "Dell Americas Region Conference Call" financial briefing dated October 2002 (it's a PDF file). At one point, the brief breaks down PC market share into 5 categories: Large Corp, SMB (Small medium business), Gov't, Education, and Consumer. The figures vary up and down, but Dell leads all categories except Consumer, where it's edged out by HP/Compaq. So what do they do? They add up their percentages for the five categories, divide by 5, and come out on top in the "Total" category at 27%. Dude, we've got a winner!

Poor IBM -- they're dwarfed by Dell, but what really hurts their total score is that they don't have any presence in Consumer according to these numbers. Well, add four scores plus zero divided by five sucks royally.

According to Dell, Apple's total is 4%. But why are we even counting Large Corp, SMB, and Government? Apple is *not* targeting anything directly in those fields, so let's chop them off! Okay, now we have Education and Consumer -- add 15% (which is too low) and 4% for 19%, and then divide by 2. NOW Apple sits at 9.5%!! THAT'S MORE LIKE IT!

Wait, there's more! How about we create a category for "Graphic Artist/Publishing" and peg Apple's number at 50% (I know, that's low-balling) -- 15 + 4 + 50 � 3 = 35.6%!!!

Okay, if we do the stupid thing and lump this category in with SMB, then Apple has 2% market. So 15 + 4 + 2 � 3 = 7%. We're still doing fine.

So my advice to Apple's marketing: Start spreading the word our market share is far higher when we include relevant data. Who cares of if IDC wants to lump Apple in with categories where Apple is not actively marketing...it's about perception. If people finally understand that Apple has more market share then conventionally believed, they'll start buying in, boosting market share like a self-fulfilling prophesy. Then we'll be at 11% anyway, and it will only build further.

Now start spreading the word...

[moki]

The definition of marketshare is:

"The percentage of the total sales of a given type of product or service that are attributable to a given company."

The way the PC industry determines "marketshare" is on a quarterly basis. Total installed base does not enter into the equation. By this definition, Apple's marketshare is indeed around 4%, and it has been declining.

It is true that about the same number of Macs get sold year to year (depending on product introductions, promotions, etc.), but more PCs get sold every year, so the share of the market is getting smaller.

As for the article, well... pass the salt.

[kupan787]

Originally posted by Graymalkin:
The only myth is the journalistic integrity of the article's author, without so much as a single referenced source other than the internet at large it is difficult to believe any part of this article.

I found this at the bottom of the SPYMAC page (which hosts the original article):

Jack Campbell is a successful entrepreneur and journalist who has used Macs since 1985. His work for Spymac.com is focused on the continuing business and technology shifts that drive the Apple marketplace. Jack encourages feedback at [email protected]

So some *cough* journalist *cough* for spymac came up with this?

Looking at his numbers, he says that there are 240 million Windows PC's and 32 million Macs. The problem with that is in a 1999 or 1998 Newsweek (it was an article discussing Linus Torival (sp) the createor of linux) it was quoted that Windows had an installed base of 330 million (it listed installed base of Mac and linux, but I don't recall those numbers). So assuming his mac numbers are correct, we see that:

Windows - 91.1%
Mac - 8.8%

But then I think the whole "marketshare" thing is total crap. For example in my house we have 6 runnable macs. Only 5 are in use. So would that count as 5 or 6? My cousin has 5 runnable PCs at his house, but only 3 of them are ever active (the other 2 sit in his closet). So again, do we count 3 or 5? My roomate in college has an iBook, but back at this house they have 1 more mac and 2 PCs. The mac is only used when he comes home (so it is mostly off). So does that count to the marketshare numbers? If you count a machine that is runnable but not activly used, then do we count the thousands of machine passed to the dumps just because someone bought a faster machine (the last one still works just fine).

I think what should happen is someone should look back over the sales of computers since Windows95 came out, and figure out how many PCs have been sold, and how many Macs have been sold. Then base a "marketshare" number on that. It would be interesting to see, as that would basicly throw out a lot of the POS (point of sale) PCs running DOS, and shouldn't be counted to marketshare anyways, as far as developers are concerned. I thnk that would be a more fair number. I actually think this might be fun, and maybe I could take it up...

[TheIceMan]

Originally posted by Don Pickett:
From Slashdot: http://www.alliedcomputing.com/default.php?news_id=50

Certainly puts a new spin on things.

As Mac users, this would be great...IF it were true. Unfortunately, the fact is that Apple has less than 5% of the market, according to Jobs himself.
Last check one article quoted Apple at less than 3%. And this CNN article states that Apple has b/t 2%-3% global market share. This number is reality.

[JLL]

Originally posted by TheIceMan:
Last check one article quoted Apple at less than 3%. And this CNN article states that Apple has b/t 2%-3% global market share. This number is reality.

As moki said, those numbers are only for the last quarter - not the total installed base.

But total installed base will always be a guess.

[Cipher13]

Statistics? Please...

[g. olson]

Of course, market share isn't really all that important. I just checked the balance sheet, and Apple has about $4.2 Billion in cash and short term investments and long term debt of only $316 Million. They are spending about $100 million per QUARTER on R&D! This is not a company in trouble. With a large installed base, great new products in the pipeline, a super-loyal customer base, and $4 billion in the bank, market share is almost an afterthought (except to the extent that growth is limited.)

[besson3c]

It's not surprising that Apple is around 5% (or whatever) of total PC sales.

Companies can and do buy PCs more frequently because you can get mass amounts of PCs very cheaply, and administrators desire a homogenous computing environment where they can create ghost builds of the machine tied to the hardware installed. (The PC users where I work at are constantly, wiping, ghosting, etc. their machines. I'm not quite sure what inspires them to do so so frequently!)

In large companies with a lot of retained earnings, it's often smart to invest in new machines frequently.

Macs do not have a strong presense in these sorts of large corporations.

And what happens with these PCs that are replaced? Perhaps sold/recycled as used (and probably not included in the number of total sales these stats are based on).

My point is, there is more than sales volume which needs to be considered in determining marketshare, IMHO. Especially in environments that have frequent product upgrade cycles. If there is a 5:1 ratio of PCs:Macs and there are 1000 computers bought every month, you can see how this will alter these numbers over a long period - even though the number of employees actually using these machines probably remains roughly constant.

[BTP]

How does that go? There are three kind of lies: Lies, damn lies and statistics...

I don't feel better or worse because of statictics, even accurate ones. Am I to feel better/worse because my chosen platform has a higher/lower marketshare?

The only way that marketshare matters to me is how the hw/sw developers are affected by it. I mean if they choose to base what they will sell on dubious marketshare statistics instead of if they making money on a product, that is a concern to me. ( I know there is an oversimplification in there, but the point stands)

In a lot of ways, marketshare is meaningful to the platform, but more to outsiders than the users.

[Cooter]

....mindshare is far more important than marketshare, as the former precedes the latter.

OS X is gaining some serious mindshare, and down the line that will begin to translate into increased marketshare. The next year will be a rousing one for the Maccies.

[g. olson]

I need to amend my earlier comments about marketshare. It is important to insure a good supply of third party software development.
Gary

[mrchin]

...so are there computer reps at all of the dumps in the US, or world for that matter, that count every Mac or PC that gets trashed, sending a minus 1 tally to the plate umpire to subtract one from the clicker?