Microsoft's Disappearing Market Share

Did you know that Microsoft has apparently gone from 95% share of the consumer market to 20% in just 8 years?  Well, that's what Goldman Sachs says, anyway.  Here's an ExtremeTech article about it:

Microsoft's Share of the Consumer Market Plunges

In the ExtremeTech article the author muses about what happened in 2005 to cause Microsoft's share to drop instantly from 95% to less than 50%.  He speculates that the real drop came with the release of the first iPhone in 2007 and Goldman Sachs simply messed up the numbers.

I think he's wrong.

I agree that Goldman Sachs probably messed up the numbers.  But I think they did it by changing what they chose to count; in midstream, as it were.  Eg. they decided that up to some arbitrary point in time they would only count personal computers but after that arbitrary point enough Other Stuff -- like phones and tablets and such -- has crept into the "consumer market" that they should start to include them in the count. 

Or maybe there is a point in time that there begins to be enough sources of meaningful data for all that Other Stuff that they could safely start to include it in the counting. 

As the author says, Goldman Sachs doesn't bother to expound on either that anomaly or their methodology.  But they apparently chose to place that arbitrary point in time at the beginning of 2005.

In any event, it does not change the fact that in what constitutes the consumer market for computing devices in 2012 Microsoft has become something other than the dominant player.  That is a significant change from it's total dominance of what was the consumer market for computing devices in 2000.

The consumer market for computing devices has changed rather dramatically in the past decade or so.  Microsoft?  Not so much.

UPDATE: June 15, 2020

I'd like to amend that last statement to point out that Microsoft has indeed changed rather dramatically but not in the fashion discussed above.

Microsoft's focus has shifted significantly in the past decade or so. 

The Windows operating system remains a strong focus for personal computers, especially desktops and laptops. Not so much for tablets although they continue to refine the tablet interface.  But Windows no longer plays the same central role it used to.

Their application library has expanded it's reach with versions of almost everything available for Windows, OS-X, Android and iOS. That gives them much expanded revenue opportunities for pretty much the entire app portfolio.

But the biggest shift at Microsoft is their move to the cloud. It has become clear the past few years that they see the cloud as their future and have made huge investments in development time and money, and internal reorganizations. Their cloud services are now responsible for the largest portion of their revenues. 

And that's a pretty dramatic change.