Net Applications, which publishes monthly so-called-but-not-really “market share” numbers for such things as browsers and operating systems, has announced that their stats are now weighted by country. The company’s website states:
In the past, we reported only on our raw numbers. As of August 1st, we have implemented retroactive country-level weighting in our reports. This means that we adjust our reports proportionally based on how much traffic we record from a country vs. how many internet users that country has. For example, although we have significant data from China, it is relatively small compared to the number of internet users in China. Therefore, we now weight Chinese traffic proportionally higher in our global reports. This change produces a much more accurate view of worldwide usage share statistics.
After consulting with many of the organizations we report data on, we decided to use C.I.A. data as the source of the number of internet users per country.
In addition to providing better share numbers, the reason we made this change was due to growing traffic imbalances in certain countries. Some countries were growing traffic at a much higher pace than the rest of the world and it was creating unacceptable variances in the share numbers. The reason we delayed June numbers was due to these imbalances. From now on, a single high growth country will not be able to affect the global share numbers.
This change has produced some significant changes in usage share for various technologies. The primary ones are:
Baidu – Baidu goes to 9% of global search engine usage. Baidu is on a major growth curve, which is affecting the relative share of all other search engines.
Google – Because of Baidu’s growth, Google’s global share is actually going down. This is almost completely due to Baidu and does not reflect the rest of the world.
Apple – Since Mac share in the U.S. in significantly higher than the rest of the world, Mac and Safari share drop in the global reports.
Opera – Opera goes up to 2% in global reports. This reflects the significant share they have in Eastern Europe and Asia.
Full article here.
Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune, “The so-called market share reports issued every month by Net Applications have long been controversial — mostly because they didn’t actually measure market share (which business people typically express as the number of widgets they sell in a given period divided by the total number of widgets sold). What Net Applications did instead was sample data from browsers visiting their clients’ websites and report what percentage came from machines running Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.”
Net Applications’ “market share” reports’ “dependability — and perhaps their credibility — just took a huge hit,” Elmer-DeWitt reports. “Starting in June the company changed the way it weights its data, giving more weight to page views from countries with large Internet populations that aren’t well represented by their clients (such as China) and less weight to hits from countries like the U.S. that are over-represented in their data.”
“The effect was to cause wrenching changes in the results — so wrenching that Net Applications skipped its June report entirely,” Elmer-DeWitt reports. “And on Saturday, when it finally issued its July report, the new country-by-country fudge factors were applied retroactively to all past reports.”
Elmer-DeWitt reports, “To see how different they are from the old, we have to go back to May, the last month for which we have comparable data… Microsoft Windows’ share grew more than 6%; Apple Mac OS X fell more than 51%;The iPhone OS lost nearly 60%; The iPod touch — whose rapid growth was the subject of a Net Applications featured report — fell off the chart; Java ME — Sun Microsystem’s (JAVA) plaform for mobile devices, barely a blip in previous reports — grew 212%.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we’ve always noted, the actual percentage numbers are not as important as the trends shown since all “market share” reports have unique measurement sources. If anything, Net Applications is providing one measure of installed base, rather than “market share.”
Again, what’s important are the trends (and consistent data points, which, with the “country level weighting” applied retroactively, still provide consistency). The trends show Apple’s Mac OS X and Safari web browser ascending. Frankly, what’s more important to a platform’s health and to developers (at least it should be) is installed base, which, for Mac OS X, is currently over 33 million discerning users — who actually pay for software (imagine that!) — and growing.
The actual numbers can be made to say anything, but the facts remain, Windows PC shipments, even with a flood of cheapo “netbooks,” have been declining while Mac shipments continue to rise.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Scot,” “MacRadDoc,” and “qka” for the heads up.]
Baidu?
Where have I been?
Wow. Mac “market share” is pretty much negligible in this report. Guess Ballmer was right after all.
Message to Pundits: Per the comments in the MDN Take, it is important to observe the trends. This week’s trend shows Apple’s market share cut in half probably by Netbook sales!!!
Windows grew from 88% to 93%.
Mac dropped from 10% to 5%.
Linux grew by 18% but still doesn’t achieve 1% market share.
iPhone, iPod touch might as well not be on the chart not placing as high as “other.”
I call shenanigans.
Stupid.
this means nothing to me in the long run, I still use my mac everyday, it is still better than windows and i’m happy
so who cares?
Kinda sobering to see how powerful that Windows Monopoly has on the planet. Yet allowed to continue.
Since how Net Applications measures share has no effect on any aspect of Apple Inc.’s performance and doesn’t in anyway retard or hinder the rate at which Apple Inc. is acquiring market share relative to its competitors in the markets for client computers (the Mac), smartphones (the iPhone), media players (the iPods, particularly the iPod Touch), the various iTunes Stores (music, video, iPhone Apps, etc.), then so what.
the only ‘people’ who might be interested in the numbers and percentages are the four-eyed, little weasels with pants pulled up to their ribcage, basement slumming with the molds cause they can’t stand the light, anal-ists.
imho
For example, although we have significant data from China, it is relatively small compared to the number of internet users in China. Therefore, we now weight Chinese traffic proportionally higher in our global reports.
Um, what? Shouldn’t it be the other way around, that it gets *less* weight? Or am I missing something?
theloniousMac,
Baidu is a Chinese search engine.
As of August 1st, we have implemented retroactive country-level weighting in our reports…This change has produced some significant changes in usage share for various technologies.
Translation: Now, no one can figure out what the heck is going on.
@Gabriel,
What they are saying is they have relatively little data for China, but CIA data says China has a large number of internet users. Therefore, because they have less data per internet user in China and more data per internet user in the US, they weight their Chinese data higher than their US data on the assumption that the data they do have is representative of the total population of internet users.
If their sampling is properly random, the rule of thumb is their results will be accurate to within ±5% 95% of the time. Of course, the accuracy of the results due to sampling methods is independent of the accuracy of the results due to the framing of the question being asked.
“…we decided to use C.I.A. data as the source of the number of internet users per country.”
So, we can deduce from this statement that the US CIA is now tracking world-wide internet use?
Fsck me…
Good news for Apple investors !
The precedent report left a tenfold marketshare increase for Apple, and now It outlines a crazy twentyfold increase…
Twice as Much Value !
Why is China and India represented at all?
Virtually nobody in China or India buys their OS legally.
You can purchase Win 7 in any bazar in the Orient for the equivalent of $3 USD. Not only that, the copy you buy does not try to phone home.
Proud to be part of that 5% — a happy rounding error.
Facts are statistics looking for an argument.
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They are probably using info from the CIA factbook, which is just a collection of data.
I am inclined to believe that people have always wanted “market share” data, but noone has reliable market share data. Thus, in order to sell their reports, NetApps is applying their actual data collected hits, to the ESTIMATED number of internet users, country by country. So, the result is dependent upon the quality of the CIA Factbook estimate of number of users.
The better approach would be to have a better distribution of websites, collecting hit data.
Barring that, wouldn’t they be better off averaging several sources for country by country net users, rather than rely upon one source?
On a weighted monthly average, my birth weight was probably 150 pounds or so. As mentioned, you can make statistics say anything you want.
There are probably tens of millions of homemade computers running pirated versions of Windows around the world.
I’ve been to Bulgaria regularly since 2002. In the middle of Sofia there are a couple of streets where you can get almost ANY piece of PC software. Mac stuff is rare, but available.
There are ring-bound notebooks with xeroxes of software packages. You flip through, tell the guy what you want, he makes a phone call and tells you to come back in a 1/2 hour. It’s usually $10 or $15 per title on a CD.
I don’t know ANY one there that has brand name PC, except for a few friends with Macs.
Is any of this stuff counted? CAN they?
I doubt it.
Does it matter? Not really.
I’m amazed at the level of vitriol directed toward Macs lately. Now that mac market share is growing and Windows share drops gradually, they’re grabbing at ANYthing to try and put the Mac down. It seems MUCH worse than it was even in the bad old days.
90% isn’t enough?
Or is just that the pure shitty badness of Windows is common knowledge these days?
@ theloniousMac: http://ir.baidu.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=188488&p=irol-homeprofile
@ Jubei: Windows “monopoly” heh. There are probably more legal legitimate, paid-for copies of Windows in North Dakota than there are in China and India combined.
For a more accurate count Net Applications needs to also correct for pirated copies for operating systems that are not public domain since they do not represent any financial benefit to the companies selling them. If Mac OS has 1% share in China, and Windows 95% and 80% of Windows copies are pirated that means only 7.6 % are legitimate. That brings the Mac share up to 4.9% and Windows share to 11.6% and the Windows share to 88.4%. This is assuming there is no Linux. If you take Linux into account the Windows share will be a lot less.
Let’s wait until someone with paid access to NetApp publishes US numbers. Who actually cares about pirated Windows market share?
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So when it comes to countries like China, Mac OS vs. Windows share numbers are totally different than Mac vs. PC share numbers because of piracy.
In the US those numbers are somewhat closer, but still different.