After Amazon released its recap of holiday sales, Microsoft might be feeling a bit under the weather like UFC legendary fighter Anderson Silva. Both threw punches but ended up on the floor mat in the process. With the Scroogled campaign, Microsoft aimed at discrediting Google and its cloud-based Chrome-powered laptop Chromebook in full blast; however, the campaign seems to have backfired as the Chromebook remains on top of the sales charts.
Microsoft has been bashing Google for its privacy practices and has launched several campaigns to discredit the search engine giant and its products. In November, it launched also a section on its online store just devoted for Scroogled merchandise, ranging from T-shirts, mugs, among others.
The software giant also threw several big punches on the Chromebook. The first one tapped the services of reality show Pawn Stars to tell consumers that the Chromebook is not a real laptop. Then it followed it up by sending "Ben the PC Guy" to Venice Beach in California to make people 'realize' that they cannot do anything with a Chromebook when it's offline.
So far, so good, at least till Amazon released a press release on December 26, which revealed that the Samsung Chromebook and the Acer Chromebook were its best selling laptops during the holiday season. Ouch.
Then things went from bad to worse for Microsoft as NPD Group revealed in a report that one out of every 5 laptops sold in 2013 was a Chromebook. "Chromebooks accounted for 21 percent of all [preconfigured] notebook sales, up from negligible share in the prior year, and 8 percent of all computer and tablet sales through November, up from one tenth of a percent in 2012 - the largest share increase across the various product segments," reported the NPD Group after monitoring computer sales in 2013. Ouch. Ouch.
NPD also pointed out the Chromebook was the primary driving force behind the 28.9 percent growth in notebook sales. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.
On the other hand, Windows notebooks did not show any growth over its performance last year and is pegged at 34.1 percent, a drop from a 42.9 percent share in 2012. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.
"The market for personal computing devices in commercial markets continues to shift and change. New products like Chromebooks, and reimagined items like Windows tablets, are now supplementing the revitalization that iPads started in personal computing devices. It is no accident that we are seeing the fruits of this change in the commercial markets as business and institutional buyers exploit the flexibility inherent in the new range of choices now open to them," said NPD Vice President, Industry Analysis, Stephen Baker.
