BBC bias towards Microsoft proved (not)
The recent Microsoft Mesh announcement at Web 2.0 provoked some calls of ‘bias’ by the BBC favouring MS. Some felt the coverage was disproportional with respect to the level of product being delivered beyond the usual promises and slide-ware. In a former life I worked for the Beeb so I have some interest in the veracity of this claim.
Simple research points to a broad market share figures (rounded on my part) which gives MS a 90% share, Apple a 7% share and all others (mostly Linux) a 3% share. Therefore it would be reasonable to expect news coverage in roughly the same proportion, using the following search terms ‘Microsoft Windows’, ‘Apple Mac’ and ‘Linux’ and out of curiousity ‘IBM’ the results were as follows:
| Articles | ||
| Microsoft Windows | 9500 | 61% |
| Apple Mac | 2700 | 17% |
| Linux | 1000 | 6% |
| IBM | 2500 | 16% |
The search was run on the BBC ‘news’ section only and I know the percentages are sort of spurious and that if I added in iPhone I would boost the Apple numbers, but by my reasoning the bias looks to be towards Apple not towards Microsoft.
By the way a search on IBM Lotus gave me 11 stories (and some of those are very interesting)