In recent video game news, analysts have found that the Xbox 360 outsold the Wii in 2010 for the first time since both consoles hit the market in 2006. The shift in sales numbers demonstrates a considerable shift in what consumers expect out of their HD gaming consoles.

Market analysts Doug Creutz noticed that the Xbox had begun to catch the Wii’s monthly sales figures in early 2010, and then dramatically increased its sales when Microsoft introduced a slim model and the Kinect motion-sensing controller and systems. These systems in fact have sold over 10 million units since their introduction, which significantly helped the Xbox 360 catch the Wii.

Analysts like Creutz believe that gamers have since gotten over the introduction of Wii’s motion sensor controllers, which were the first on the market. They now realize that they can get a better package from the higher powered consoles like the Xbox 360 in addition to getting the motion-sensor controllers, which are popular with mainstream and casual gamers.

Creutz, in a note to Cowen Group investors, wrote, “This illustrates the significant shift that has gone on over the last year in the console space,” he said. “This does represent a share shift as opposed to just a decline for the Wii. We believe the significant shift in hardware sales towards HD consoles is a positive ongoing development for the US publishers, who earn the majority of their sales on the 360/PS3.”

Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that sales of the Wii are dropping. Nintendo’s console continues to fare strongly, having been sold over 454,000 times in February of 2011. Compare that to Microsoft’s selling 535,000 Xbox 360s that same month and it’s easy to see that the console industry is alive and well in 2011.

What remains to be seen is how Nintendo will respond to this shift in the console marketplace. Rumors abound that the company will showcase a brand new console system at the upcoming Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles this summer.

Arvind Bhatia, managing director of the brokerage firm Sterne Agee, said recently “We would not be surprised if Nintendo unveiled the specifications of its next console at E3 in June this year, followed by product introduction early next year.” After all, given the recent sale numbers, it’s finally about time that Nintendo released a console with the hardware and power to compete with Sony and Microsoft’s own consoles.

==== About the Author ====

Mariana Ashley is a freelance writer who particularly enjoys writing about online colleges. She loves receiving reader feedback, which can be directed to mariana.ashley031@gmail.com.

Based on the 2010 reports from Netmarketshare.com, the web browsers from Google and Apple have slowly been stealing users from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. In the chart below, we can see the trends over the last year. (chart by CNET)

This may be partly due to the new browser ballot in Windows 7 that is required in Europe. However, even if that’s true, Microsoft still has no excuse for it’s falling browser marketshare. When the beta version of IE9 was released in February, no affect was seen on the marketshare. We’ll have to wait to see what happens when the finished version is released.

The gains by Chrome and Safari came at the expense of Internet Explorer‘s dropping percentage, which ended the year at 57%, after starting above 60%. Google’s Chrome browser gained almost 5 points in 2010 and ended with 10% of the market. Safari gained about 1.5 points and ended at about 6%. Firefox and Opera remained about the same at 23% and 2%.

The question that we think most interesting is What browsers do Techie Buzz readers use?. Here’s a chart from Keith showing our data.

The Techie Buzz chart shows more readers using Firefox than Internet Explorer. Chrome users are in third place, followed by Safari and Opera. If we can assume that most technology sites have similar stats, this doesn’t look good for Microsoft.

It appears that the more people know, the less they use Internet Explorer. Many people feel that the crucial advantage to using Firefox and Chrome is that they are more easily customized by using Addons and Extensions. Do you think Opera’s adoption of extensions will help them steal share from Microsoft?

Dell has had a spectacular growth in the PC market in India. Just in the last quarter, personal computer manufacturer, Dell overtook all other big brands to become the No. 1 in the desktop PC segment for the first time in India with a market share of 9.8 per cent in the third quarter of 2010, according to a research firm IDC. HP and Acer are in the second and the third spots respectively.

However, Dell had overtaken HP in the last to last quarter in the Indian overall PC segment (including notebooks and desktops) with a huge 15.2 per cent market share. Looking at numbers in general, Dell sold 16.7 lakh units of Desktop PCs which alone accounted for nearly 60 per cent of the total PC sales of the company during the September quarter. The company also managed to clock 11.1 lakh units sale for Notebook PCs.

IDC’s Lead PC Analyst Sumanta Mukherjee said that launch of multi-colour models, complemented with aggressive promotions and discounted bundling schemes did the work for Dell especially in the Indian portable notebook market. However, the rate of growth for mini notebook PC shipments dipped marginally. Given the good performance of the desktop PC sector, Dell can definitely cover this up too!

A new report from Nielsen says that Android is the most popular mobile operating system among new buyers in the United States. The data which was compiled for August shows that Android based devices were more popular than the iPhone iOS and RIM based devices.

Nielsen compiled the report after the iPhone 4 became available in June and covers the months spanning from January 2010 to August 2010. In that period 32% users purchased an Android device as compare to approximately 25% RIM and iPhone devices each.

RIM is still ahead in the overall market share with 31% users, however, it is losing steam to Apple iOS based devices who command 28% market share. Android has grown an impressive 11% in the past six months to have a market share of 19%.

Other major operating systems like Palm Pre, Windows Phone and Symbian command 22% of the market share. It would be interesting to see whether Microsoft will be able to penetrate the heavily competitive market with the launch of Windows Phone 7.

Android which is really turning out the closest competitor to the iPhone iOS will definitely gain more market share in the coming few months. With the holiday season approaching and a slew of Internet Tablets being launched, the OS market share is bound to change. So it would be interesting to see where these OS stand in somewhere February 2011.

IE6 is probably the most dreaded piece of software on earth. Web developers don’t hate anything more than this silly browser full of security holes, bugs and not conforming to much web standards. Once heavily used, the market share for IE6 was almost 90% back in 2002 and 2003, however, with the introduction of new browsers like Firefox, Chrome and Opera, users started ditching Microsoft’s  disastrous  browser.

According to StatCounter, a free web analytics tool, the market share of IE6 in the US has fallen to 4.7% down from 11.5% a year ago. Similar stats resonate in the European market. These usage trends were identified by analyzing over 15 Billion page views in May 2010. The browser with larges market share currently is IE8, followed by Firefox 3.6 and IE7 respectively.

One large reason IE6 is taking so much time to become obsolete is the corporate users who are usually the last one to switch to a new software due to potential issues and related costs. Moreover, a lot of corporate tools that were built 5-6 years ago still don’t work with Firefox or latest versions of IE, leaving the users with no other choice than to hang on to the dreaded IE6. It is probably the only piece of software against which several online campaigns have taken place. Most of the large websites like YouTube have already dropped support for IE6 and ask you to use an alternate browser if you try to access using IE6.

Apple has crossed the market capital of Microsoft for the first time. On current trade rates, Apple’s market capital is valued at $227.27 billion as compared to Microsoft’s $226.96 billion.

To view the current market situation you can visit this Apple vs Microsoft comparison page on Google Finance.

Please note, the value of the bourses keep going up and down, so you might see a different market capital while viewing the comparison. However, Apple should definitely overtake Microsoft market cap and remain stable over the next few days.

(via Venture Beat)

Google’s Android has been seeing a steady increase in the market share of its devices in the US market. Back in January 2010, the mobile usage report by comScore, put Android’s market share at 7.1%, however, the February 2010 report has shown around 2% market growth for Android, giving it a 9.0%, an overall 5.2% increase since November 2009.

The biggest losers during this period were once again Microsoft and Palm, however, RIM still retained the top position with their Blackberry device accounting for 42.1% of the total US market share. Apple though has remained stable with around 26% of the market share, however, you can expect their numbers to grow because of the recent iPad launch.

For Device manufacturers, Motorola was still the top OEM followed by LG and Samsung, however, Motorola lost around 2% of the market share since November 2009.

In all there were around 234 million Americans with mobile devices out of which 45.4 million users owned smartphones, which is a 21% increase since November 2009. With the flurry of new devices being launched, this number will definitely sky rocket to around 100 million within the next 3-6 months.

Bing is definitely doing pretty good in the US market with 11.5% market share, however, guess who is sending Bing traffic? Well, there are no surprises in the top 3 traffic sources for Bing, which are MSN, Facebook and Windows Live Mail.

So where is the surprise then? Well, let’s call it Google. Google is the 4th largest source for traffic that Bing gets to their site. Wow, how?

Well, Microsoft purchases ads on Google for Bing using Google Adwords for popular terms like "Search Engines", and they also show up high in the search results for several terms, as seen in the screenshot above. This may be one of the main reasons of the traffic Bing gets.

Based on the recent traffic reports from comScore, Bing got around 1.6 billion users in Feb 2010, which implies that Google sent approximately 66.7 million users their way.

Now that big an amount of users would definitely cost a lot, especially when Microsoft is advertising on premium keywords. So no matter what the scenario Google are in, they still making money out of Bing.

The Nitty Gritties

According to the report by Hitwise, almost 43% of the hits to Bing come from MSN domains, followed by Facebook with whom Bing have a deal for search, and Windows Live Mail, which is the proprietary email service owned by Microsoft.

The surprise though is Google at 4th with around 4.1% traffic share, which is almost the same as Facebook and Windows Live Mail, but this might definitely mean that Microsoft has loosened its pockets a lot, and are advertising Bing aggressively on one of the biggest search engines on planet Earth. Yahoo with whom Microsoft signed a deal for search is there at 5th with around 2% of the traffic.

The Bing traffic was compiled by Hitwise and posted on Twitter at Twitpic. Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land, spotted the report and wrote the analysis on it.

comScore has released a new report on Mobile market share for quarter ending January 2010. There is not much surprise there, but Android has taken a huge leap in the market share gaining 4.3% to have a market share of 7.1% in January 2010, RIM too gained 1.7% to remain the market leader with 43% share.

Motorola saw a disappointing quarter losing 1.2% share in the handset market, however, they were still market leaders with 22.9%, followed by LG with 21.7%, Samsung with 21.1% and Nokia with 9.1%. RIM, the manufactures of Blackberry saw the only modest increase in devices with a 1.4% increase over October.

In the Smartphone market, which consisted of 42.7 million users, RIM was the market leader with 43% market share, followed by Apple with 25.1% and Microsoft with 15.7%. Microsoft lost around 4% market share, which was promptly picked up by Google with their Android OS gaining over 4.3% market share.

Text messages were still the top reason for which the mobile devices were used, followed by browsing, gaming, apps and social networking. All of the phone activities saw an increase during this quarter.

From the data available it is becoming clearer now that Android will definitely make a huge dent into the mobile market in 2010. Windows Phone 7 which is slated to release later this year might pull back some users for Microsoft, however, it is more than certain that they will be the biggest loser in the next few quarters.

Apple has also not made any significant leaps, which suggests that users are starting to prefer Blackberry over Apple, and also shifting to other devices which are powered by Android and Nokia.

The data was released by comScore MobiLens service, which tracked over 234 million American mobile subscribers.

The search market share for February 2010 is in, Bing has once again managed to increase their market share in the month of February by gaining 0.2% share for a total of 11.5%. On the other hand, Yahoo has continued their downslide by falling 0.2% to 16.8%.

On the other hand, Google seems to have not been affected and has instead gained 0.1% market share for a total of 65.5% share.

The data in question comes from comScore, which said that the total US search volume has increased 10.4% in February 2010 for YoY data. Other search engines like Ask lost 0.1% to end up at 3.7% and AOL stayed flat at 2.5% market share.

Bing has shown a decline in search market only once since it has launched, however, this could be attributed to their recent deal with Yahoo. However, Microsoft has not been able to make a dent into Google’s market share and has been consistently eating into that of Yahoo.

It will be interesting to see how the search market pans out in the next 3-4 months and whether Bing is able to snatch some share from Google. Consider that Microsoft is pouring pocketfuls of money into advertising Bing, it is high time that they start seeing some good results too.

All data is for US markets only.

[via Business Insider]