“In the face of dubious market research portraying Apple’s iPad (and perhaps the entire tablet market) as troubled and teetering on the brink of collapse, Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook expressed a sincere lack of concern while addressing analysts, alluding to long term strategies for outliving tablet rivals focused on volume shipments and short term market share gains,” Daniel Eran Dilger writes for AppleInsider.
“One very troubling problem with IDC’s statistics is that after the company publishes its estimates on the tablet market, it revises them after the fact. There’s only one company’s tablet numbers that don’t ever change: Apple’s,” Dilger writes. “That’s because IDC (like other research groups) constructs its tablet estimates around Apple’s iPad figures, the only sales data that is ever reported publicly.”
“[The] vast, multi million dollar shifts that occur in IDC’s estimated tablet shipment figures strongly suggest not only that IDC isn’t very confident in its ability to estimate shipments, but also that its estimates are penciled in to arrive at a desired conclusion, rather than being hard data worth drawing significant conclusions from,” Dilger writes. “This harmonizes with comments made by a former IDC analyst who described the process of market estimates to Philip Elmer-DeWitt of Fortune as being a “sausage-making process” driven by the mantra ‘preserve the growth rates; to hell with the actual numbers.’ Tellingly, he added, ‘the fudge is in the ‘others’ category, which is used as a plug to make the numbers work out.'”
Dilger writes, “IDC’s statistics also appear to intentionally obscure important, relevant context. First: Apple’s iPad sales are more cyclical than its competitors. Second: the rest of the tablet market is performing very poorly and largely offers products that do not directly compete with the iPads Apple is selling. Third: Apple has a long term strategy that isn’t simply targeting shipment volumes in an effort to impress the same tech pundits and market researchers who thought netbooks were going to have a lasting impact on the PC industry.”
Tons more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take:
IDC: Windows Phone to surpass Apple’s iOS by 2015 – June 10, 2011
Related articles:
IDC and Gartner numbers do not jibe with Apple’s double digit U.S. Mac growth – July 27, 2014
IDC: Apple iPad maintains lead in worldwide tablet market – July 24, 2014