So now it’s okay to just make up market share numbers?
Last week Microsoft COO Kevin Turner made a shocking proclamation in this Dow Jones article:
“We launched our first product in October of this past year. from then till now, we gained 24 points of market share against a very, very formidable competitor,” Turner said.
There are at least two problems with Turner’s statement:
- Hyper-V 1.0 was released in June 2008, not October
- There is absolutely no data available to support the fictitious “24 point gain”
Microsoft is still scrambling for a convoluted explanation of this lie — I can’t wait to hear what they come up with. Please note, however, that the part about VMware being a “very, very, formidable competitor” was independently verified to be true.
Virtualization.info just published a short article on the topic and mentions some previous market share numbers — helps put things in perspective.
Between the “million Hyper-V downloads” and this new fabricated market share statement coming from the highest levels of Microsoft, it raises the question:
What else is Microsoft Virtualization making up? Customer wins? Price comparisons with VMware vSphere?
Smells like desperation to me.
Remember lies and statistics?
Using statistics, you can make numbers sound relevant even when they are not.
If they gain 24 percent (that’s what they mean with points not?) on a 5 percent market share then they are now having 6.2 percent. The 5 percent example is made up as I don’t know how high their claimed market share is. After all they don’t mention a real number in the article….
Now that doesn’t sound spectacular at all does it? It is much better to say that you’ve managed to grow your market by 24 percent, even when it only means and increased number of downloads of the OS that provides the virtualisation role.
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Wil
Wil, that is one way of looking at it, but I really think they intended to say 0-24 percent of the entire market in half a year.
Joe, they think we are.
You have to wonder are they really that stupid or do they think we are?
Joe,
I think they know pretty well what they are doing. They know for sure most people will immediately identify it as bullshit, but many uninformed people will actually believe it.
A more than perfect fit for FUD.
Funny that Kevin Turner provides no explanation as to 1) How the Virtualization market is defined – Server Only? Free vs. Enterprise? Test/Dev Production? and 2) How share is defined or calculated – Revenue? Deployments? Usage? Oh and who, what was the sample?
Microsoft PR – probably scrambling – has come back and said that Muglia’s claims at least were based on “Internal Data” http://bit.ly/hdMdZ – yeah and based on “Internal Data” I am a lot of things – Great Golfer, Expert Chef, Great Dancer, Charming, Witty – none of which are probably true 🙂
Maybe VMware should add this to their EULA. They could prevent others from talking about them and/or giving any numbers at all. Sounds about par for the course with VMware.
David,
I never thought of that. Thanks for the idea — I’ll submit it via the VMware Employee Suggestion Program(tm) right away.
Eric
Hello-
This is the article Kevin Turner may have been referencing – http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=8959