"This view of the treemap shows a sea of red. There is very
little green representing growth. If we compare the whole of 2008
with 2007, not just quarters, at the end of June, five out of the
six category families were ahead of the prior year. Then, the
bottom fell out and only the medium-sized Consumer Operating
Systems showed a small year-over-year increase. As mentioned in the
last post, the growth of consumer operating systems was fueled by
Mac OS X.
"When we drill into the category families a bit, we see that 7
of our 10 top categories [super-categories] sold fewer units in
2008 than in 2007. In other words, our bigger and typically more
stable areas were selling fewer units in 2008. In the first half of
2008, there were 19 super category areas that were ahead in the
sales over the first half of 2007, yet they ended up losing enough
ground to show a year-over-year decrease in units. In alpha order,
those super-categories are CAD, cisco, data topics, database
programming, desktop publishing, digital design topics, digital
video and animation, document processing, graphics applications,
mathematics, media players other, network administration, not
technical, repair upgrade, rich web interface, Ruby, security
topics, software techniques, and word processing."
