Scratching my head at the Zune sales figures
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
May 31, 2007 at 1:52am
Kudos to Microsoft. The company says it’s sold (or is that shipped?) over a million Zune digital music players in the US. The Big M also says the Zune now has 10 percent of the digital music player market—but I don’t understand the math. And, apparently, neither do some other folks.
Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division, told the San Francisco Chronicle that “in the category we’re in, the hard-disk-based category, we’ve got about 10 percent market share” with the Zune.
If that’s the case the company has really made some in-roads. Bloomberg reported that for March 2007, Apple led the MP3 player market with 68.9 percent market share, followed by Sandisk (11.2 percent), Creative Labs (3.6 percent), Microsoft (2.5 percent) and Samsung (2.2. percent). There’s probably a great deal of variance considering that Bach was talking about the “hard-disk-based category,” and the Bloomberg report simple lists all MP3 players (flash-memory and hard-disk based). But still, from 2.5 percent to 10 percent is a whooping leap.
Also, Business 2.0 doubts that Microsoft has actually sold a million Zunes. The article says that Bach actually told the Chronicle was this: “When we finish our fiscal year in June we’ll have sold a little over a million Zunes,”
“That’s what we used to call an editing error, one that mistakes a projection with actual sales and expands the time frame by about 15 percent,” notes Business 2.0. “Microsoft still has more than a month to sell its first million Zunes, which would put it on the schedule it set for itself, not ahead.”
Oh well, as I’ve said before, numbers can be used to prove anything and 99.9 percent of all statistics are made up. Regardless, Apple sold around 25 million iPods over the same time it has taken the Zune to sell a million units—although that figure includes sales around the world, not just the U.S. And as of April 9, approximately a 100 million iPods have been sold. So the Zune still has … uh … a bit of catching up to do. And Bach was gracious enough to tell the Chronicle that Apple is a “great company and a worthy competitor.”
Competition is good; it keeps everyone on their toes.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 10,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
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