Splitting shares: the top of the PC game

IDC and Gartner came out with their periodic reports on market share in the PC industry recently – reports that, for the most part, few people outside the marketing departments of the companies listed really care much about.

These ones were interesting though, for the mere fact of how close the game at the top of the ladder appears to be.

Both reports put Lenovo on 15.7 percent market share, but IDC had HP on 15.9 percent while Gartner had HP on 15.5 percent (the difference accounted for by IDC counting workstations while Gartner apparently doesn’t).

Both companies promptly issued statements explaining why this means that they’re really the leading player in the PC industry, or at least defining terms like “workstation” and “PC industry” and “leader” to best suit their agendas.

The reality, of course, is that both analyses are based on methodologies that include a certain amount of sampling and projection or what you and I might call “guessing”. It’s simply not possible to count every single personal computer that gets sold everywhere in the world in a given time period, so such projection is entirely valid and should not at all be taken as impugning the value of the results.

They may be guessing, but both IDC and Gartner are very, very, good at guessing.

The fact that both IDC and Gartner had Lenovo selling 13.8 million units for its 15.7 percent share is testament to how good the guessing has become – such agreement is not exactly the norm. There’s almost always a few tenths of a percentage point difference this way or that between the two, and that difference is rarely the subject of much commentary. The only reason it’s noteworthy this time is because it changes the rankings of who’s number one.

What it really means is that it’s basically a tie for first place.

I did my own highly scientific research on this. I went to my local railway station and asked 20 people on the platform to name a company that makes computers. Nine of them said Apple, four said HP, one said Dell and the rest said Microsoft. Microsoft, of course, does not make computers. Yet.

You may think HP should congratulate itself on the startlingly high mindshare it has earned at my local railway station, but one must take into account that my local railway station is Rhodes in Sydney, mere metres away from HP’s headquarters, and the people I was asking quite likely worked for HP.

They probably have implants that give them mild electric shocks if they say words like “Lenovo” or “Dell” or “Apple”. I only hope they have other means of keeping the doctor away.

The conclusion I drew from this (using massive extrapolation and guesswork) is that people for the most part don’t actually care or even know who makes the computers they buy. HP and Lenovo are tied for first place in a race no-one’s watching except the people in it.