I don’t often wait with bated breadth for a CD I’m reviewing; but this one was one of few I was eager to see. Finding good market share and business ranking data is a serious problem when conducting market and economic research. The problem is exacerbated when dealing with global data. Before opening this CD, the most reliable solution I had found was searching the web, Electric Library, STAT‐USA, and DIALOG, and then piecing things together. This is an expensive way of doing business, both in time and cost of DIALOG data. So I had great hopes that Gale’s product would enhance productivity while cutting costs. For market researchers it probably does. For anyone else I doubt it.
Gale has collected a massive amount of market data and made it child’s play to access. Most of the data is clipped from business and trade publications, though some is from what appear to be “high priced” industry market studies. The CD contains more than 40,000 entries covering thousands of companies, brands, and products. Unfortunately the data tends to be a bit old (the newest stuff in the trial searches I ran was from 1996, making it two years old.) Most was from the early 90s. But at least it’s data.
There are several search options for finding the data. These include open text search based on strings and boolean operators, click and point query building, and “expert search” ‐ a command language which allows searching specific fields and linking the fields with boolean operators. The search results can be saved or printed. One can also cut lines out of a report and paste them into another document. This last capability needs to be used carefully as the license agreement states you cannot “reproduce, publish, distribute, sell, lease, loan, or transfer data to third parties, including related institutions.” It sounds like you need to consult the lawyers before you use cut and paste and e‐mail the results to a friend who works in another university or company subsidiary. Personally I find this pretty offensive and stupid. Why pay $975 for data which is in the public domain if you cannot reproduce it?
The CD comes with both a quick help card and an extended manual. Like most users, I put the CD in, ran set‐up, and started playing. My first search was by company. I wanted to see if I could find the market share of Bechtel in the environmental remediation business. I selected Bechtel Group and got 196 tables, including some which were close, like Largest Hazardous Waste Contractors, 1995. The data source was ENR’s Top 400 Contractors. To see if I could get this data for free, I got on the web, went to Alta Vista and entered ENR and “Top 400 Contractors.” Bingo. ENR is the Engineering News Record of McGraw Hill’s Construction Information Group. A better surprise is I can search the database for free and get more current information than on Gale’s CD. BUT ‐ and this is important ‐ I might not have found the site as quickly without looking at the CD first.
My second search looked for market share data for electric plug manufacturers ‐ the little thing on the end of the computer power cord that plugs into the wall socket. I figured this would tell me how precisely I could search. The answer is not very precise but probably enough. I got a series of tables for electric connectors (SIC Code 3643, Current Carrying Wiring Devices). These included the Top 10 Connector markets for 1994 and 1995 (data from Bishop & Associates). This time, by the way, when I went to Alta Vista I could not get that data. On the other hand, the data in which I was more interested was in a table entitled Top Connector Producers Worldwide, 1992. The data source was Fleck Research and the table was reported in Electronic Business Buyer. Once again a quick web search turned up the 1993 data.
The pattern is clear. Most data from a journal can be found on the web without too much effort ‐ and you do not have the same copyright licensing restrictions. Despite this problem, I give this one a qualified recommendation to buy. The qualification is that you have to understand that this CD is primarily a tool for use with other data sources, like the web and a good library of trade journals. Given that understanding, Gale has provided a useful place to start when looking for market data addressing shares and rankings. The CD’s older data also is helpful for forecasting, as it provides the data points for trend projection. If you do a lot of searching for this kind of data, the cost is worthwhile. You’ll cover it in time saved finding data sources. If not, don’t buy it. Invest in improving how you formulate your web queries.
