"Market share" is such a bogus metric, any way. Net income is what actually matters. Is their net income up or down? What about Acer and ASUS? I bet Acer with their 17.1% market share is operating closer to bankruptcy than Apple with a 4.1% market share.

jjasper

#12 – 10:23 AM December 24, 2008

Didn't the previous post just say something about Boing Boing's trip to CES being sponsored by Asus? I'm all for showing them some love, but why bother bashing competing brands to do so?

Rob Beschizza

#13 – 11:55 AM December 24, 2008

What? Who did we bash?

Oh, you're being a dick. Merry Christmas!

Mindpowered

#14 – 12:50 PM December 24, 2008

"The notebook PC is no longer a tool only for the business market, or a computer for the well-off consumer; it’s now a computer for everyman.”

Comrade. The running dog imperialist lackeys and their VIAO's and Powerbooks have been humbled by the proletarian might of the glorious peoples Acer.

jjasper

#15 – 1:32 PM December 24, 2008

Actually, I thought that talking about pointing out that getting sponsorship from a company in one post and then talking about how they're beating out the competition in the next is a bit troublesome should be OK.

If I was being a dick, I'd have used profanity. But I try and use respectful language. You're right, and I was wrong. You weren't bashing anyone. My apologies for the mistake.

Still, as a news organization of a sort, does BB have a policy on articles praising or condemning sponsors? How do you cope with the potential for a sponsor pulling out if you write something negative about them, or the temptation to hype your sponsors so they keep sponsoring you?

dculberson

#16 – 1:52 PM December 24, 2008

I really don't see any praising and am confused as to where you do. It's a single line, then an image linking to an iSuppli article. The single line is based upon facts laid out in the linked article.

Praise uses subjective adjectives like "awesome" and "cromulent." "loses market share" is not bashing, and "surges" is not praising. It is a statement of fact. It seems reasonable to describe a 45% increase in market share as a "surge."

Rob Beschizza

#17 – 3:15 PM December 24, 2008

Another company handles the ads. To us it's just like adsense: dead space on the layout, not much in our minds. It doesn't figure into coverage at all. I think we've had them remove ads that misbehaved now and again, because of autoplaying sound and such.

Criticism of Asus:

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/06/30/asus-new-matrix-gpus.html
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/10/31/asus-gets-customer-t.html
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/11/03/a-day-with-asus-eeep.html

Praise of Asus

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/09/08/asus-eee-pc-1000h-a.html
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/07/25/asus-announced-whole.html
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/11/03/latest-asus-pc-cases.html

And so on!

One exception of note is that I coded a flash game that was cobranded by Intel and used to promote Offworld.

jjasper

#18 – 3:25 PM December 24, 2008

I know who handles the ads (FM) but I as wondering more about the sponsorship thing. Looks like there's no impact. Thanks for explaining.

Joel Johnson

#19 – 4:03 PM December 24, 2008

The relationship between sponsors and editorial on blogs is always a weird thing, but I can assure you that we fight back against anything that feels icky to us and for things that seem borderline try to make things very (perhaps overly) transparent so you guys can make your own judgements.

This is especially hard in this economic climate, because it's easier to make a justification when it means keeping operating expenses flowing (although, thank god, we're totally fine at the moment and '09 looks better for us than it does for many), but it's really important to me personally to make sure that we aren't influenced one way or another when it comes to writing about sponsors.

Ixty

#20 – 11:47 PM December 25, 2008

"Apple makes so much profit on a MacBook Pro, it could afford to give buyers an Asus netbook or Acer Aspire One free."

I, for one, agree!

meadhbh

#21 – 9:09 AM December 29, 2008

@DCULBERSON (#11)

FWIW... when you go to business school, "market share" as an important metric and predictor of short and medium term success is emphasized. i had to pay a fair amount of coin and sit through classes to learn what is described relatively well at:

http://tutor2u.net/business/marketing/market_analysis_marketshare_importance.asp

but yeah... this analysis _does_ assume that MacBookPros and Asus NetBooks running Linux are direct replacements for each other (which is not entirely true when you look at TCO.) It also assumes that you're after a mass market appeal. Charlie Stross above points this out with his comment about Porche. A lot of dot-com'ers and web-2.0'ers are probably familiar with the long tail / prosumer / demand aggregation concept. but alas... i'm guessing apple's board and major shareholders are probably not thinking about that.

EBITDA (and i would argue that EBITDA is more important than net profit) is definitely important, but if you're a company trying to sell a "mass market good," it's highly likely your board will begin to freak a bit if your market share goes down, even if your net profits are up, unless you decided you wanted to change your strategy to become a niche player.

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Acer surges as Apple loses PC market share, overtaken by Asus

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