Apple, Google Top Brands of 2004

The iPod alone sold 4.6 million units in the last quarter, practically doubling sales since its launch. (There are now about 10 million pod-addicts on the planet.)

Meanwhile, iMac sales tripled as Apple’s overall computer sales rose by 26 percent over 2003 sales. Music division iTunes became the blueprint for Napster-alternative online music sales.

Apple’s cultural symbolism was not economically symbiotic. Its worldwide computer market share dropped to less than two percent in 2004 to a 1.87 percent share in Q3 of 2004 (down from 2.19% in Q3 2003). The 2004 world leader for market share was Dell at 18 percent, followed by HP at 16 percent and IBM with 6 percent.

Not far behind Apple, and equally appealing to those navigating a potentially complicated technical landscape, is Google.

The world’s number one search engine, Google’s impact on our readers reflects the online public’s growing dependence on sorting through an incomprehensible amount of available information. On our screens, its minimalist design betrays its maximal capacity. But Google does more, including technology licensing and hardware, news aggregating and shopping (Froogle). According to the company, 95 percent of revenue comes from AdSense advertising.

Google lost little ground in being dumped as the search engine behind Yahoo early last year; it conducts more than 200 million searches a day and leads the world for search engine usage with 57 percent of the current market, followed by Yahoo at 21 percent and MSN at just 9 percent.

Google faces competition on many fronts including Yahoo’s Overture search engine and other solutions like Vivisimo’s Clusty, and MSN Desktop Search, all of which hope to build a better mousetrap.

The upside to Google’s future? Only 12.7 percent of the world population has access to the Internet, leaving 5.6 billion potential future users.

Brand Channel