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Originally Posted by Prof. Peabody 
I guess I'm asking for the moon.
What I want is for the writers at AppleInsider to get their own numbers. I think it's kind of sad that a few minor sites like Gruber's are willing to do the (10 minute!), 'back of a napkin' calculation to inform their readers of the actual *platform* share, and AppleInsider doesn't bother. This site used to have some really insightful articles, but now they've gone the route of just posting the figures that are given to them by others.
It's not exactly calculus to figure out what the actual platform share is from the smartphone share and the shipping numbers etc. It's not that hard at all.
I guess I'm asking for the moon.
What I want is for the writers at AppleInsider to get their own numbers. I think it's kind of sad that a few minor sites like Gruber's are willing to do the (10 minute!), 'back of a napkin' calculation to inform their readers of the actual *platform* share, and AppleInsider doesn't bother. This site used to have some really insightful articles, but now they've gone the route of just posting the figures that are given to them by others.
It's not exactly calculus to figure out what the actual platform share is from the smartphone share and the shipping numbers etc. It's not that hard at all.
Harder than you might think because HTC don't break down WP7/Android. Samsung don't break down WP7/Android/Bada. Moto don't break out their old JVM handsets. S-E do, sort-of, but they're kinda a joke. IDC don't even give us any breakdown on 'Other' unless presumably we buy the commercial reasearch product, so we have to scrabble around through the OEMs earnings reports.
These OEM numbers are the 'hardest' numbers that we have, but they don't give us platform sadly - for that we have to depend on consumer surveys, at least in the realm of publicly available numbers.
What these numbers are useful for, and particularly the raw handset numbers - is gauging how the OEMs' supply is having to shift to meet demand. We can see Apple and to a lesser extent HTC straining to meet demand. We can see Samsung growing steadily. We can see other OEMs slashing margin to try to avoid overcapacity.
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Case in point is yesterday's story about the Xoom sales. There was even a line about "hmmm... these might just be channel sales." They just reported the number given to them yet a simple trip to a couple of other websites and some math will tell you that roughly 75% of the channel sales ended up turning into "real" sales. So the actual sales figure is easy to determine. Why not do the ten minutes work required instead of just repeating newsline stories verbatim?
Indeed - or less, as I commented in that thread I think given your assumptions it would be 50%. Thing is though it's easy to produce those sales figures, they depend on a bunch of other assumptions or data. I wouldn't object if they did the analysis, but I'd like the raw numbers too.
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Being a reporter or a journalist used to mean that you did some research and figured out what you needed to understand, then you report that story (which is "yours" because, you know, you figured it out). Nowadays it seems everyone is just republishing the same crap, direct from the mouths of the distributors, with almost no comment, let alone analysis. There is no ownership of the stories because there are no stories, it's just an echo chamber for the industry.
A news story appears on AppleInsider, BGR, TUAW, Engadget, etc. and within fifteen minutes it's on all of them, albeit using slightly different wording. Sometimes these stories are completely wrong but everyone is so busy trying to be first they don't even notice. Most of these stories are also plants from the sources these groups are supposed to be "reporting" on. The computer companies in question might as well just pay people to print what they tell them to. It would be simpler and it gets the same result we see on most of these sites.
A news story appears on AppleInsider, BGR, TUAW, Engadget, etc. and within fifteen minutes it's on all of them, albeit using slightly different wording. Sometimes these stories are completely wrong but everyone is so busy trying to be first they don't even notice. Most of these stories are also plants from the sources these groups are supposed to be "reporting" on. The computer companies in question might as well just pay people to print what they tell them to. It would be simpler and it gets the same result we see on most of these sites.
Well they're aggregators, not really reporters. I'm fine with that as it simplifies my data-hounding.
