Microsoft, IDC at odds over numbers

By ADAM GIFFORD

IT industry research firm International Data Corporation's bullish estimate of the health of the New Zealand PC market has been challenged by the new head of Microsoft New Zealand, Ross Peat.

IDC reported its latest findings and predictions at a seminar in Auckland yesterday that was optimistically entitled Capitalising on the Recovery.

Analyst Darian Bird said IDC expected about 343,000 PCs, not including servers, to be sold in New Zealand this year, compared with 322,000 last year.

It picks growth of 6.3 per cent overall, with notebook sales of 10.5 per cent.

Speaking on a panel at the seminar, Peat said Microsoft saw it differently.

"Our view, based on operating system licences, is the market [to the year ending June 30] is between 260,000 and 270,000 units," Peat said.

He said that was a 10 per cent drop on the year ended June 30, last year, when Microsoft believed about 290,000 PCs were sold.

Microsoft measures the year to June 30, and IDC looks at the calendar year, but Peat said that did not explain the wide discrepancy.

"We have felt for some time the total size of the installed base was being overstated, and we get additional figures on international shipments into New Zealand from the multinationals," he said.

Peat agreed with IDC that sales should pick up in the second half of this year, as companies started replacing PCs bought in 1998 and 1999 to replace Machines which were not Y2K compliant. He was picking 5 per cent growth.

Bird said he would need to talk through the differences with Microsoft, but he stood by his estimate.

"Each quarter we get the numbers from the vendors and then check them through the channels," he said.

Colin Brown, from the PC Company, said some companies might try to talk up their figures, skewing market perceptions. This worked to the disadvantage of local assemblers.

"I'd be inclined to accept the Microsoft figures. Microsoft does very careful data collection because it wants to make sure it gets paid," Brown said.

IDC country manager Dinesh Kumar said reductions in hardware prices meant the total amount spent on single user systems, that is PCs and printers, would drop 10.5 per cent this year to about $1.2 billion.

Users were resisting pressure to upgrade operating systems. About 21 per cent were still using Windows 95, 23 per cent were on Windows 98, 29 per cent were on Windows NT and 22 per cent on Windows 2000.

IDC said it was unable to find a statistically significant sample that had upgraded to Windows XP.

Peat said most XP sales had been in the consumer market and would not have fed through into IDC data yet.