Claims by Compaq Computer Corp that it has taken the number one position in the UK workstation market from Sun Microsystems seem to have as much to do with the black art of statistical manipulation than to reality. Compaq says it holds 37.4% of the UK Workstation market, basing its claims on figures from Gartner Group’s Dataquest division, and Compaq put out a press release claiming that it therefore dominates the workstation market. The figures as compiled by Dataquest define a workstation as being an Intel Pentium Pro-based NT workstation or a Unix workstation, and some confusion has arisen as a result of Dataquest’s recent decision to include high-end Intel machines as being workstations, regardless of the applications they are running. In addition the figures look rather different when revenue rather than units shipped are used as the measure, with Sun weighing-in at $42.5m and Compaq at $28.4m for the third quarter.
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