The Time Of Year When Everyone Lies

http://www.lockergnome.com/theoracle/2011/01/13/the-time-of-year-when-everyone-lies/

It’s getting near the end of January, the end of the fiscal year for many companies, and also the time when everything must be “settled up” for the year.

So it is no wonder that when looking around it is easy to fins a mass of conflicting information, as if conflicting information was the new best friend of everyone.

But it is also the time when you see how the language is twisted around to make things better, or worse, so that a certain end can be achieved.

For example, in a story from PC World, we are told that Mac sales are climbing, as PC sales lose market share. In the same area, we see Dell returning to the number two spot in overall sales, among PC manufacturers, as it had dropped to third previously.

But in a story from PC Magazine, it is as if we were in a mirrored universe, and somehow just broke though to the other side, because, with a quick twist of the facts, we are told that all the PC sales growth is down – which at first seems like a statement converse to the data from the PC World story, until a closer inspection reveals that it is the acceleration of sales that is down, not the sales themselves.

In fact, overall PC sales were up by 2.7 percent, but did not make the 5.5 percent that the Gartner group had projected. It really is a game of tricking the consumers, the government, the players of Wall Street, and anyone else involved in the process of forecasting anything PC.

One thing is certain, and was not skewed by either story – tablets are cutting into PC sales, at least for now. In the long run, as I have said, they are an additive device, making the market larger, not shrinking it one iota.

The good news that the average Joe and Jane can take away here is that PCs will probably not go up in price over the next few months, the amount of RAM found in those PCs will be up (probably averaging 4GB, as more people move to 64bit Windows and because the DRAM makers are hurting as well), and the top five players in market share in the United States are all changing their positions, all the time, as none has such a distinct advantage over any other that it can just sit and let sales happen.

Another thing, though we are told in that PC World that Mac sales are climbing, elsewhere the information comes that the sales are not what they were projected, so Apple is stealing from itself, as most of the reason is the iPad.

As I said, this is the time of lies, after mid-February we’ll once again be able to read things with more straight data and less interpretation guided by the financial departments – the marketing departments will once again take over.

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