The Math of Undertracking

[superchunk]

amirnetz said:

ioi said:
if a company says they have shipped over 5 million that doesn't mean exactly 5 million have been shipped, could have been far more than that. Our sell through numbers are solid through Europe. I think the problem is that you take statements made by pr men too literally...

You may want to read my other posts on public statements from companies on that detail their business performance.

The short story - they cannot lie about business performance. It is illegal. When Microsoft reports that at least 2M units were shipped in EMEA between June and Nov 19th then it is the truth. If June was actually more than 5M (and therefore they sold less than 2M since) then they are creating a false representation of their business performance. This is is illegal and they could be held liable.

Companies may cherry pick the business performance numbers they are using in their PRs. But whatever they report is matching their books.

 

You mention he might not have read your other posts, yet you clearly didn't read the many posts that state where you are wrong about this in regards to media announcements. They don't have to be 100% perfect in a media announcement, so they can and do round off numbers.

That and I don't think you read my post where they had 4m in the channel in January of 2007.