Net Applications: Apple just lost half its 'market share'
Source: Net Applications
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.
But despite their flaws, we tracked the net metrics firm's reports because their sample size was relatively large — some 160 million visits per month — and because they offered regular snapshots of broad market trends. They revealed, for example, the rise of Firefox, the decline of Internet Explorer, the failure of Windows Vista to catch on. Their reports were consistent, dependable, and free.
Until now.
Net Applications' reports are still free, at least some of them (mobile market share data now costs an arm and a leg). But their dependability — and perhaps their credibility — just took a huge hit.
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.
Wrenching changes
The effect was to cause wrenching changes in the results — so wrenching that Net Applications skipped its June report entirely. And on Saturday, when it finally issued its July report, the new country-by-country fudge factors were applied retroactively to all past reports.
The new market shares for the major operating systems are represented in the pie chart above. 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. The results are summarized in the table below. The major effect of the new weighting system:
- Microsoft (MSFT) Windows' share grew more than 6%
- Apple (AAPL) 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%
Net Applications has retroactively revised previously published data before (see here), but never to this extent.
In defending the changes, the company argues that they provide a much more accurate view of worldwide usage share statistics. But it also acknowledges that the new method produces "some significant changes in usage share" — usage shares it published with great confidence only a few months ago. The changes it highlights:
- 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.
[What the company doesn't mention -- but several readers have pointed out -- is that their operating system numbers are now much more in line with StatCounter's global stats.]
You can see Net Applications July market share reports here, and read about the new methodology here. See Ars Technica's primer for a good review of the different ways to measure market share.
See also:
Interesting to see the Linux numbers jump as well, particularly in relation to Apple's market share. Worldwide, Linux does a heck of a lot better than the industry press gives it credit for.
Well some of it may be fixing the view of the net as not just the US 
On the other hand, Apple has rapidly done harm to itself by ill-fated measures like censorship and blocking of applications even by giants like Google in order to conserve its 70s or older paradigm of "1 device per household". Kind of like TV and other copyrights groups and organisations not yet living in the 21st century.
Apple as a company which gained most of its earlier success grounded on outdoing some of those labels, music and media companies has at least when it comes to device flexibility and user desires fallen behind others like Google or Amazon. If they don't listen to their community instead of bluntly dictating their ideas in a stalinist matter, then soon percentages will drop even further.
Counterfeit products are running rampant all over the internet especially on Ebay. Ebay allows counterfeit cell phones and other stuff to be sold at large. How do you measure how much of Apple's share is being lost to blackmarket sales? cheap checks cheap personal checks
@Paul Taylor
They just did – much to Microsoft's advantage on paper. This is just a list of computers being used – not who's making the money.
How do you factor in counterfeit offerings that are at least ten to twenty times more prevalent in the largest countries you're now adding weight to?
Here's what the CIA World Factbook website has to say on its data for internet users:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2153rank.html?countryName=United%20States&countryCode=us®ionCode=na&rank=3#us
******
COUNTRY COMPARISON :: INTERNET USERS
This entry gives the number of users within a country that access the Internet. Statistics vary from country to country and may include users who access the Internet at least several times a week to those who access it only once within a period of several months.
*****
So, according to the CIA data, they count equally users who may access the net several times a week to those who access it only once within months. What happened to those who access it several times a day? Sounds like the CIA is out of touch with the internet use reality.
Here are the 3 top net regions:
RANK
COUNTRY INTERNET USERS DATE OF INFORMATION
1 China 253,000,000 2008
2 European Union 247,000,000 2006
3 United States 223,000,000 2008
So, while NetApps is collecting data monthly, the adjustment, aka fudge factor, could be three years out of date. Their error rate went way, way up. Just report the RAW data, and let users do the interpretation. Adjusted data is only as good as the adjustment made, and the adjustment as I've pointed out is out of date and represents the broadest possible definition of internet user.
It would appear that the statisticians behind this report work for the TWO Political Parties; lies and duplicity, while blowing the FOG of obfuscation, everywhere!
Market manipulators and data manipulators. None of this stuff is in any way shape or form accurate. Both systems are guesses. What do you want to show? They will manipulate the data to show it.
The news is not at all bad for Apple. In fact, it's very optimistic, provided that the methodology for each month is applied consistently. Here's why.
Delta between June and July Mac numbers indicates that nearly 1 million Macs were sold in July. This, combined with three facts: (1) the complete laptop refresh and price decrease at WWDC in June; (2) the 2.6 million Mac sales figure for Apple FY Q3, a near-record in a quarter that is normally a slower period; and (3) the upcoming back-to- school sales period in August and September, could combine to allow Apple to approach the 3 million sales figure for this quarter. I am currently modeling 2.85 million Macs, generating $3.8 billion revenue and 60 cents EPS for this quarter.
Delta between June and July iPhone numbers indicate that about 2.75 million iPhones were sold in July alone. Again, combined with three facts: (1) continued constrained supply of 3GS in initial launch markets, according to Tim Cook and Apple availability table; (2) very heavy interest in late June and July launch markets like Japan and Singapore; and (3) same quarter in which they sold 6.9 million of the 3G last year, they could have sales approaching 8 million iPhones. I am currently modeling 7 million iPhones, generating $2.1 billion revenue and 35 cents EPS for this quarter.
The bottom line is this – even with thin iPod sales (10 million), Apple could be on pace toward $9.3 billion in revenues and $1.50 EPS, both 18% or more increases over the same quarter in 2008.
It's still quite early in the quarter, but the numbers from July are fantastic.
Please note that my EPS predictions for the last two quarters have been accurate to within 3 cents and 2 cents, respectively.
Philip, The headline and article that you wrote are very misleading. Net Applications until this point primarily reported English speaking numbers where Apple has a much larger market share. You and I are both fans of Apple but be real they don't have a 9% market share globally. You shouldn't disparage Net Applications because they changed their methodology to incorporate more global numbers. Remember the world doesn't only speak English.
I dont really care as Macs are flying off the shelves and truthfully I dont want Apple to get too big. Too many potential viruses. I love my apple products and lets not share with the whole world. lkmd
I love Apple, but reality is reality, I am happy that this change reflects it better. It doesn't change any major trends, which was the useful information the previous reports gave. Apple's was going up, in new data its still going up, reflecting that was a real trend.
But now the report more accurately reflects real installed base share worldwide. Who wants illusions?
I think its great they realized they couldn't continue being consistent with different countries changing at different rates, and solved the problem for once and all.
This only adds to their credibility.
As an advertiser with a 6-figure online budget am I trying to reach the Chinese speaking population with my English only website, iPhone app and OS X Widget? Not at all.
Seems NetApplications has opened the door for a new company to produce results I want.
Of course, of course. I loaded Windows on my Mac, so all my Mac OS data is now Windows. Pretty meaningless stuff.
http://wereport.com/
Catchy headline, but not very truthful. It implies the number of Apple users has dropped by fifty percent. The method of reporting may have changed, but half of the users have not disappeared. In reality the share is still probably inching up.
Maybe they should publish two reports, one focused on US and one world wide, to appease the whiners. To me, world wide data makes much more sense than putting on blinders to only the US. I suspect the only people that are complaining about this are apple/google fanboi's that don't like the data. Linux went up in share, that's not surprising, it has a major following in Europe. Obviously the person writing the article was biased, the article had clear undertones that they didn't like the data and their only "fault" was that it included the rest of the world in it…
I have never been happy with two things on this data from Net Applications:
1. It is impossible to get a graphical view of the OS shares when they are in a single plot, as Windows is over 90%.
2. I prefer to group the results differently.
Because of these two reasons, I have been collecting the raw data and running it through a couple of scripts. The resulting data table and three different plots are available here (together with the scripts):
Just stop reporting this garbage from Net Applications. StatCounter is more accurate.
ex ped: Actually, Net Applications' new numbers look a lot like StatCounter's Worldwide. See here.
Interesting article