Judging by your comments you appear to be something of an industry expert.
Let's just say I got around a bit. Based on your comments I guess you've been in sales for Tek? If so then I'm the type of person that sits opposite you (customer). Aside other things, I specify and buy test equipment (lots of it, really) for a larger number of technology labs spread around Europe and the US.
We also maintain very good contacts to other labs, facilities and to some extend Universities and technical training schools which are used to gather and process independent market figures for our own use, far away from manufacturers' Kool-Aid. What we don't capture (and don't care for, honestly) are sales to individuals like one-man shops or hobbyists.
I'm not involved in data gathering/processing, though.
I didn't represent that TEK currently has 50% DSO market share. I could not possibly know that. What I said was the last time I saw a market share report, and I only saw 1 independent report, that was the number I saw.
I do know there was essentially NO DSOs made at that time except those made by HP, TEK, a few Lecroy some by Gould and some by Nicolet. That tells me this was before Lecroy seriously entered the scope market.
Which LeCroy did in 1981 and back then there wasn't really a large market for DSOs anyways. My data doesn't go so far back but irrespective of Teks marketshare being 50% or not it's a lot easier to become dominant in an emerging market than in an established one, which is what the DSO market is today.
Now the market is loaded with cheap Chinese imports and I would expect that they would dominate the unit volume but probably not the dollar volume.
I doubt that they dominate the unit volume, at least not for units sold under their own brands. The hobbyist market seems to love them but in the commercial field they are still pretty much non-existent.
Since TEK became a part of Danaher in 2007 sales are no longer reported externally so no one outside of TEK/ Danaher really knows what their sales are. Indeed even employees below top management were not provided with sales information except in a general sense. I did hear some numbers from time to time that were " leaked". They seemed lower that what I though they should be. I can tell you that in my territory though I did annual market share analysis. I do not claim absolute precision but I had been in the territory for 31 years so I pretty much knew what everyone had. In my last year (2011) with TEK I estimated scope market share at around 40%. At that time I do not have responsibility for low end scopes- those below about $15K and so my numbers did not include them. My Agilent counterpart agreed with this analysis. He admitted that we were kicking his ass. I did not even know who the Lecroy guy was... Your stated market share in analog agrees with numbers I have heard, but did not see. I do not know how other territories or other parts of the world fared.
That's pretty much the opposite from what I have seen and also what our data shows. Tek sales have been dwindling since at least 2004, and in 2011 I very much doubt their market share was even close to 40%, much less so for the mid-range and high-end segments, both areas where Tek hasn't really been competitive for ages. Things were a bit better in the low-end, predominantly thanks to the edu segment, which Tek courts in the hope that it hooks more people to their brand.
And frankly, that's not surprising. Unlike their analog scopes, Tek DSOs were rarely anything to write home about. Entry-level scopes with ridiculously low memory, mid-range and high-end scopes that were limited in performance and capabilities compared to its competitors while in general being painfully slow ("like wading through molasses" is a term often associated with TDS5000/6000/7000/70000 scopes, and rightfully so). Then there are some annoying limitations (like the DPO "high-speed" mode where measurements are disabled, or the mentioned memory sizes), and some really daft ideas (like the LCD shutter on early TDS scopes). To make matters worse, instead of coming up with some innovative new products Tek pretty much continued to push their stale products in a warmed-up form.
Tek may have had some interesting scopes like the 11000 Series back in the mid-'80s, and later introduced the lunchbox format and came up with intensity grading (on which HP and LeCroy worked as well), but that was back in the '90s. Technical advances of DSO technologies since then happened elsewhere (which isn't surprising because Tek has long lost most of its talent, not just thanks to the mind-numbing DBS).
Today Tek is widely considered the bottom-of-the-barrel of the big brand scope manufacturers. The only ones buying Tek (aside from the edu market thanks to strong incentives) are people that don't know what else is out there, often with fond memories from back in the analog scope days (or they just spend someoneone else's money and thus don't care). And even then the preferrence only lasts until they have tried a modern Tek scope and scopes from other manufacturers.
Of all the labs we support, only one still buys Tek scopes, and this only for contractual reasons (limited to specific pieces of kit). We occasionally invite Tek for evaluations we do before making a procurement decision, but they regularly don't get the sale simply because their products weren't good enough and the pricing too unflexible.
Mind you that this is limited to scopes, not other categories of test instruments. And not all current Tek products are as poor as their scopes. And in regards to scopes, at least that new TBS2000 looks like a decent and well thought out unit, at least based on the data that is available so far. I'm sure the edu market will love it.
If you have current market share estimates those would be interesting.
Sure it would be interesting, we're often asked by manufacturers to provide access to our data. But that's not gonna happen.