Depends on your interpretation of &quot;behind in absolute numbers&quot;. A toy example:<p>1980: Apple has 10% of a 100,000,000-phone market. We could call this a gap of 90,000,000.<p>1981: Apple has 15% of a 200,000,000-phone market. We could call this a gap of 170,000,000. What happened was that while Apple&#x27;s market share grew, it grew much slower than the market itself.<p>I guess you might want to look at the world that way; for example, if you wanted to know how difficult it would be to convince the entire market to switch to your product. But I tend to agree that market share would seem to be more useful for most purposes.