Koodauw said:
Hummm... Very interesting, so are we to assume that market share is being measured in dollars rather than units?
There are a lot of question marks that make "market share" a bad comparison. Remember that most of these "market share" numbers are being throuwn around by outlets that want to try and make Apple look bad (Dell, CNet, etc).
My guess is they are measuring in in units sold. Why? Apple's premium prices would give them an advantantage if you measured by revenue.
Are they counting all computers sold, or trying to make a calculation of what computers are actually in active use? Good question, I have never seen anybody mention that. If they're talking units moved over a decade, that would give Apple an artificial disadvantage, because Apple users tend to hold onto their hardware longer. So a 50 - 1 sales ratio (2%) might actually translate into a 4% market share of computers actually in use.
Then, as Jack at
http://appleturns.com is fond of pointing out, this includes all the bulk corporate purchases and all the embedded system purchases. If you look at market share in the actual "personal" space, again Apple starts to look a lot better.
If you factor all of that in: remove the "throwaway" PC's, remove the corporate bulk purchases and just look at computers actually being used in people's houses, what would the Mac market share be then? I've never seen a number that even tries for that, and yet it seems it would be useful for companies to be able to effectively target their marketing.
So overall market share is a completely useless statistic that can be manipulated to mean whatever someone wants. More important is corporate health. Revenue growth, sales growth, expense reduction, mindshare, expanding into new markets...
When you look at those, who is one of the healthiest company in the industry?