Calling BS on Tablet Survey
So I ran across a Microsoft News article entitled Survey finds greater interest in Microsoft Surface than Google Nexus 7. Hmm.
I know there’s some interest in Windows Phone and the Surface, and that’s great, I’ve got no problem with that, but I’m not so crazy about bullcrap surveys. So I bounced this off of Google Trends which lets you see what people are searching for on Google web searches, product search, news search and image search. If people were truly interested in the Microsoft Surface more than the Nexus 7, unless you believed that Google would distort this data to favor their products, you’d think on a Google Trends lineup that the Surface would at least be on par with the Google product if not in the lead.
And you’d be wrong.
Parks Associates, the surveyors, ranks “tablet intenders’” preferred tablet type in Q4 2012, implying, I think, what people are probably going to buy each other for Christmas, and they came up with this:
Nexus 7 11.8% Microsoft Surface 21% Kindle Fire 23.7% iPad 2 44%
So, almost 80% more interest in the Microsoft Surface than the Nexus 7 according to these guys.
Join me for a stroll to Google Trends, let’s see what this data looks like there. Manipulate this however you want, you’ll get the same results more or less, but for the sake of not embedding a dozen graphs I’ll go with a Product Search, worldwide, over the last thirty days, between the Nexus 7, Microsoft Surface, Kindle Fire and the iPad 2, and here you go:
Using fuzzy math calc.exe let me offer you the percentages of the data of Dec 14th:
Nexus 7 49% Microsoft Surface 7% Kindle Fire 21% iPad 2 23%
The kicker: the article, the thread of which is naturally laced with Microsoft enthusiasts rejoicing, quietly links to a CNN article about the survey as its source which was, and only one commenter spotted this, entitled “Interest in the Surface fell 53% after its price was announced.” This is called cherrypicking, fishing pro-Microsoft news out of an article with that title and obviously dodgy data, or delusional reporting, reporting for the delusional or straight-up lying. But if someone wants to give me Bing Trends data on this, feel free. There’s a Bing Trends, right?
Doug Simmons
Oh right… Source: WMPoweruser
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About The Author
Doug Simmons
Biographical info.. hmm. I have a history of not being able to strike the balance between what is "safe" to put into these forms and what is, in my mind at least, funny. Can't do it.
Doug, wouldn’t a more viable comparison omit the iPad 2 and substitute the iPad Mini? Just asking. I don’t own an iPad Mini.
Thanks
dockehr
Yes I think it would. I’ll whip that up for you..
Simmons, they are Google Trends and Google was caught red handed that they cripple the results to favor them or their customers. Now tell us why one should believe in Google Trends and a proven Google lover like you. anyone with at least minimum IQ would take Google trends that show Google or its customers favoring with a grain of salt. Google trends always favor Google if Google’s interests are there and the surveys always favor the sponsored, otherwise they wouldn’t get published. Period. I laugh at you because you took both survey and Google trends seriously and ranted here. That shows how much you love and believe in Google than yourself. 😀
Okay, let’s bring this down to earth.
If the best that a product could look forward to is 7% would the makers of that product invest $millions – disregard – $billions in R&D, production and in advertising? Even more critical, would they risk $billions in good will against their 70-80% operating system world market share. These folks at Microsoft are not “cock-eyed optimists” (a la RIM), they are hard hearted, flinty eyed, profit-motivated professionals. They will not risk without significant reward. So somehow I think that Surface (both the RT and the less risky Pro) have significantly more than a 7% “intention level” in a market new to them. Certainly MS could blow it with a rush to sell or a security glitch or the invention of something new that they do not adopt. But they will not blow it on bad marketing data and potentially manipulated statistics.
@Ram: The graph directly above your post. You know, the one showing the results with the iPad Mini, makes your point totally moot.
obviously, you didn’t get my point either. I am saying I don’t believe both Google Trends and Surveys. Why should I believe in Google after they accepted they were messing up with search results. They could do the same to trends benefiting clients. I am neither saying iPad/iPad Mini/Nexus 7 selling lesser than Surface nor Surface is getting more interest over those. All I am asking was why should we believe in a fanboy like Doug Simmons, Paid Surveys or Paid Google Trends.
Hitekredneck I’m sorry I’ve been kind of tuned out of the news lately, but what’s this about Google lying in search results (let’s put aside for a moment if you can that Google Trends tracks what people type in to the search box, not what they see)? In what way did they deceive the world to have lost your trust on something like a system that lets you see charts of what people are searching for, and do you honestly think it would strike any company as a good idea to distort at all, let alone wildly, that data?
Are a lot fewer people going to buy a Surface once the word gets out from Google Trends that people are searching for the iPad and iPod and Nexus Everything a shitload more than it?
Will you be surprised when the eventual evidence of sales for these various things turn out to be remarkably congruent to what’s on these charts? And if that proved to be the case, would you maybe blame Google for making the Surface flop with their lies?
C’mon man. You’re smarter than that.
By the way, before you got so obsessed with Microsoft phones that you’ll actually believe shit like what you just wrote, buying anything from them no matter how many times they betray you (a recent example for which you got so pissed momentarily but then shrugged it off and gave them a pass include no upgrade path to Apollo), I was buying Microsoft shares. So in a sense I’m a patron. It hasn’t been much of a rocket stock but they do pay a good dividend, and I’m a fan of that.
My theory is that I might not be a google fanboy, that I am as I’ve said quite taken by Microsoft’s Windows Phone (wrote about it at length), I want them to succeed, it’s in my interests that they succeed, but Google’s got a pretty good array of services, the phones are top shelf and the platform has become rather impressive, got the apps I’ve got to have whereas WP does not, it just suits me.
Note that I am surrounded by Microsoft enthusiasts, so when you hear a guy come out with an opinion or an observation that’s contrarian to everything else or uses Google as a source, maybe your vision of how twisted and blind my allegiance to one thing or another is distorted.
Here’s something fun:
Change ‘iPad 2’ to just ‘iPad’ and add in iPad Mini…
Here, I’ll do it for you:
http://www.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US#q=%22nexus%207%22%2C%20%22microsoft%20surface%22%2C%20%22kindle%20fire%22%2C%20%22ipad%22%2C%20%22ipad%20mini%22&date=today%201-m&gprop=froogle&cmpt=q
Chris, let me do it for you, with a subtle addition:
Whoa there Dougie. I think you aimed your cannon in my direction by mistake. I agree with you. I was merely replying to Ram that his statements about Google skewing the results were moot if he would look at the Nexus and iPad mini graph. I have seen no concrete evidence that Google is the evil empire a lot of folks are trying to make them out to be. All of the evil that I am aware of is in Washington D.C. at this time and I am not a happy camper about those results at all.
Me either. Far too many republicans.
Yeah, and far too many democrats as well.