Technovia

Repeat after me: browsing share is not market share

How many times are we going to have to go through this? Computerworld reports that "Windows lost nearly a full percentage point of market share for the second month in a row in December". Except, of course, it's not market share.

In fact, they're "reporting" (I don't think it actually justifies that label) the Net Applications survey of Internet use, which the company itself erroneously describes as "market share". It isn't. It doesn't indicate sales, only a particular kind of usage.

And that's something Net Applications acknowledges itself, in a roundabout way. As it notes on its page on "market share" at present, "the December holiday season strongly favored residential over business usage. This in turn increases the relative usage share of Mac, Firefox, Safari and other products that have relatively high residential usage."

That's the important word, here: usage. And usage doesn't tell you much about the number of machines being sold, or the installed base. So to draw out a headline which makes it sound like the sales of Windows machines are on the wane, as Computerworld does, is either hype or sloppy journalism.

UPDATE: TUAW gets on the same bandwagon, with the same dumb headline and opening line. Look, I know that an Apple blog is going to want to say that Mac market share is "almost 10%", but reporting this without the caveat that it's not really market share AND ignoring NetApplications own warning about Windows being under-reported is either consumate spin or stupidity. Are reporters no longer supposed to look at things like this critically?

You know, we might just be OK

From the exemplary Robert Peston, on the deal which sees £37 billion of taxpayer's money buy big stakes in our big banks:

"RBS and Lloyds TSB/HBOS have promised to the government that they'll maintain mortgage lending and small-business lending at 2007 levels - which is massively more than they are currently lending (this is hugely significant - given that a shortage of credit is to a large extent behind the economy's deceleration into recession levels)"

As Robert says, this is massive. At the launch of Small Business Week 2008 this morning at the BT Tower, the repeated refrain from panelists was the need for banks to lend to small businesses. Without loans, it's much harder for businesses to expand or diversify - things which they need to do during tough times.

The perils of remote management