Marco.org

John Gruber on NPD’s comically misleading U.S. Tablet Sales (excluding Apple) report:

What hasn’t gotten much commentary is the extraordinarily contorted way that NPD reported these numbers.

Beyond the obvious hilarity at NPD’s extremely misleading representation of the “tablet market”, it’s interesting that they excluded the Nook Color, which may have at least shipped 3 million units. Will NPD include the Kindle Fire in its next report? If so, it should include the Nook Color (with recent software) and Nook Tablet, which are definitely “tablets” if the Kindle Fire is.

It’s also irresponsible, as a market-research firm that informs important decisions for many businesses, to issue a report about the health of PC makers in this “tablet market” one week after the Kindle Fire’s release without even mentioning it, or how it has probably already outsold the top “non-Apple tablet”. (That top tablet was the discontinued, $99-fire-sale HP TouchPad, another pertinent fact omitted from this press release.)

It sounds more like NPD wanted to issue a report that said that PC vendors were doing well in a hot new market, and then massaged the data to fit that story.

I wonder how many of those PC vendors are NPD’s customers.

I bet Amazon and Apple aren’t.