Simon’s Blog

Microsoft has just claimed that one million Zunes have now been sold. Is this true? After all, as Benjamin Disraeli once said - there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics; so what does this claim actually mean?

I last wrote about Zune sales towards the end of March. At that time, as far as external independent observers could tell, Zune was selling less than 50,000 units per month… meaning that Microsoft was seemingly not on track to meet its rather low target of a million sales by June. Now, however, just as we about to go into June, Microsoft claims to have met the target.

This begs the question, what kind of statistics are being used here to define “sales”. Is it a million Zunes actually sold to consumers? Or, is it a million Zunes shipped to retailers? There’s a significant difference. For the sake of accuracy, it would be really nice to get a clarification on these numbers…