Why Good’s enterprise smartphone market share numbers are just not good enough

Every quarter Good technology release their Mobility Index, which measures new device activations in the enterprise setting, and every quarter the numbers are parroted by the press as being reliable as representative of actual market conditions.

The above graph is their latest numbers, showing iOS had 73% of the market for new enterprise devices in Q4 2014, while Windows Phone had 1%, being steady at that level over the last 6 quarters.

What is not often mentioned however is that Good draws their numbers from a rather small pool of only 6200 enterprise customers, often skewed towards financial and legal services, and that they are part of a fiercely contested field and not even in a leadership position.

That goes to companies you may never have heard of like Airwatch and MobileIron, and even companies like Blackberry with BES. On top of that Microsoft provides its own Mobile Device Management solution, at its most basic via Exchange, and for more sophisticated purposes via Intune.  If you are are a Small to Medium Enterprise (SME) looking to cut costs, you will not only be dumping your expensive iPhones, but also your expensive Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution like Good and go for an integrated solution like Microsoft’s MDM services.

For a real look at the market it may be wiser to look at an impartial source like market research company Kantar, which awards Microsoft 19% market share in the B2B segment in  France in December 2014 overall and 28% for the Enterprise Segment in particular, ahead of Apple’s 25%. This number has grown 3% since last year.

While this just represents one country’s results, we know that Microsoft is doing equally well in UK, where they have 28% of the SME market and 26% of the M2M market.

While we do not know what Microsoft’s worldwide enterprise market share is, it should be clear that Good Technology’s Mobility Index does not shed any light on that at all, and we hope in the future journalists dismiss Good’s numbers as being pretty bad.