Hi Joe. I was a research manager in the IDC Software Reseach department in the 1990's and I continue to see their reports and analyses on an ongoing basis. They publish their analysis methodology every year as part of their annual market forecasts. It is and has been, for at least the past 10 years, based primarily on revenue. The content of the article you cited is from a conversation between a reporter and Dan Kusnetzky who is the "Vice President of IDC's System Software research, responsible for research and analysis on the worldwide market for operating environments" (http://www.idc.com/en_US/viewAnalystResearch.jht<nobr>m<wbr></nobr> l?containerId=PRF000199)
Dan is quite capable of giving estimates of what market share means in terms of units shipped but that is not what IDC bases their market analyses on. Dan is far too smart to let a methodology prevent him from correctly reflecting the reality of the market.
Because of Linux, Dan had to change the standard "revenue only" methodology as he indicates here in this interview that you can see on slashdot from June of 2001. (http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01<nobr>/<wbr></nobr> 06/21/154203&mode=thread&tid=163)
Its darned difficult to analyze a market share by revenue only when one of the players is available for free and allows infinite numbers of copies to be made from any copy.<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:-) On the other hand, since a "market size" is defined as the amount of revenue it generates, you have to find a way to relate units shipped to some kind of revenue.
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IDC Software metric always revenue based.
Posted by: jkinz on August 20, 2003 03:23 AMThe content of the article you cited is from a conversation between a reporter and Dan Kusnetzky who is the "Vice President of IDC's System Software research, responsible for research and analysis on the worldwide market for operating environments"
(http://www.idc.com/en_US/viewAnalystResearch.jht<nobr>m<wbr></nobr> l?containerId=PRF000199)
Dan is quite capable of giving estimates of what market share means in terms of units shipped but that is not what IDC bases their market analyses on. Dan is far too smart to let a methodology prevent him from correctly reflecting the reality of the market.
Because of Linux, Dan had to change the standard "revenue only" methodology as he indicates here in this interview that you can see on slashdot from June of 2001.
(http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01<nobr>/<wbr></nobr> 06/21/154203&mode=thread&tid=163)
Its darned difficult to analyze a market share by revenue only when one of the players is available for free and allows infinite numbers of copies to be made from any copy.<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:-) On the other hand, since a "market size" is defined as the amount of revenue it generates, you have to find a way to relate units shipped to some kind of revenue.
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