The Wall Street journal has had a hard time the last few days not falling into the dreaded "process journalism" in its coverage of the tablet market and Apple's respective share. Their report on Monday seemed to indicate that Apple's iPad had dropped from 96% to 75% over the last quarter due to increased competition from Google's Android, specifically the Galaxy Tab. The numbers cited came from Strategy Analytics, drawing into question once again how some of the companies stay in business offering bad statistics. This shift in market share seemed too big to be true, and in fact, it turns out that it was. Strategy Analytics, apparently, was using a metric for market share that only measures devices in the retail channel. What this means is that if a retailer or carrier store is carrying a a number of Galaxy Tab units in the store, that counts as a sale. When Samsung announced 2 million Galaxy Tabs sold, I was very skeptical and wondered if that was actually the number sold. The Wall Street Journal must have been curious about their own story because they updated it today with an admission from Samsung that the number of devices sold to consumers was actually "quite small" and that the 2 million number includes devices to retailers. That makes a big difference when you consider that Apple's numbers reflect devices sold to consumers, while Samsung is selling the Tab in every retail store and seemingly every carrier in the world. The Tab has probably sold alright for Samsung, but not nearly on the level of the iPad.
Without question, the iPad will lose market share over the next year as Google makes their first legitimate tablet play and HP and RIM introduce their own devices. What remains to be seen, however, is whether it will be the kind of loss that these illegitimate numbers seem to indicate.