Aloha, This time you finally raised some interesting points that are worthy of discussion. First, you have to seperate IDC's counting of beans from a previous year from its forecasts for the current year. They are not bad as bean counters. They, and Dataquest, have been total disasters as forecasters. Totally different tasks.
There is absolutely no question that if IDC's forecasts for 1999 are not incredibly overly optimistic for the first time in their history, then dollar sales will be up. But they will not even be close, as usual. Nobody ever asks them how lousy their forecasting record has been, but it has been pitiful. Not as bad as Texas Instruments in the chip area, but still, pretty bad.
As far as Dell's market share goes, I never said they didn't gain share year over year. Just that they had their worst sequential 3Q to 4Q share loss ever. They may gain share this year, though their main strength, the corporate market, looks dead on arrival. But, if so, it will be higher share in a rapidly declining market. While selling at 80 times eps. A recipe for disaster if there has ever been one.
MB |
