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Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS

andrewducker.livejournal.com

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Re: Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS

#61

Post by Tobu »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #30
kwekly wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's more at stake than that -- malice or not, a simple, tidy diagram can bypass a human's critical faculties and increase the feeling that the false data (and whatever it's conclusion) are more true. For a statistical research organisation, this is straight up neglect! Part of my job involves electrical drafting, and though I'm positively anal about my drawings, if I manipulate the design to make the drawing more…

How much does it matter, though? A pie chart would paint a very different picture, with iOS as a clear minority.

Here's how this looks like as a pie chart (Nielsen & Comscore data), by the way: http://www.asymco.com/2012/07/13/how-many-lumia/

Re: Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS

#62

Post by Samuel_Michon »

keithpeter wrote: post #36

Can anyone explain the advantage of the original graphic over a nicely captioned table of data? Mind you, this is a good statistics lesson. My teenage students might get quite interested in a 'discussion' of the relative merits of various kinds of phone, before representing the data and then comparing it to UK. US Mobile phone market share by OS and maker Android 51% Samsung 17% HTC 14% Motorola 11% Other 9% iOS (App…

I agree, viewing the data in a table made it a lot clearer to me, thanks.

For instance, I never knew Palm Inc. made Windows Mobile devices. I had to DuckDuckGo it, I've never even seen anyone use one. And apparently Palm stopped building them in 2009 [1].

Also, it's shocking (to me) that Windows Mobile still has double the installed base as Windows Phone does — it's not like Windows Mobile was a great smartphone platform, given its Pocket Internet Explorer was comparable to IE5-6.

The 9% installed base for Blackberry doesn't surprise me, and I imagine that long after RIM doesn't make phones anymore, there will be users who are still tied to its services. I foresee it going the way of IBM.

[1] http://www.wpcentral.com/palm-finished-windows-mobile

Re: Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS

#63

Post by damoncali »

baconner wrote: post #59
damoncali wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I'd think that Nielsen's business is to make sure their customers know what's going on. In my experience, that is not the case. The information they provide is generally used by middle managers in large companies in internal powerpoint decks with the intent of waging intra-company warfare. The use of the the info is highly political and opinionated, not rational and academic. So, yeah, it would be preferr…

"For Nielsen to spend time and money obsessing over these sort of things woud go largely unappreciated." This would be extremely short sighted thinking. I'm a big beleiver in the art of not doing work that's unnecessary, but the art is in knowing when it matters. When not doing the work directly contradicts your brand's supposed strengths publically that's a problem. Nielsen's brand is built upon a reputation of high…

The customers aren't clueless. They just have other cares.

Re: Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS

#64

Post by baconner »

damoncali wrote: post #63
baconner wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"For Nielsen to spend time and money obsessing over these sort of things woud go largely unappreciated." This would be extremely short sighted thinking. I'm a big beleiver in the art of not doing work that's unnecessary, but the art is in knowing when it matters. When not doing the work directly contradicts your brand's supposed strengths publically that's a problem. Nielsen's brand is built upon a reputation of high…

The customers aren't clueless. They just have other cares.

Even worse IMO.

Re: Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS

#65

Post by damoncali »

baconner wrote: post #64
damoncali wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The customers aren't clueless. They just have other cares.

Even worse IMO.

Why is that bad? They look at a nice, easy to read but disproportionate chart, come up with an idea that helps advance their cause, and work it into their presentation. That is how it's done, and it does not require mathematical rigor or loose ethics.

This is apparently a very offensive line of reason here, judging by the downvotes I've acquired for pointing this out. I find that to be interesting in its own right.

Re: Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS

#66

Post by Foomandoonian »

This story used to be called 'Why is Nielsen misrepresenting smartphone market share?' I thought that was a brilliant headline, and it made me jump into the conversation here. I doubt the new title, 'Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS', would have caught my eye.

Why do the titles on HN keep getting neutered?

Re: Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS

#67

Post by jrwoodruff »

damoncali wrote: post #41
mkaltenecker wrote: post #25

It’s quite astonishing that so many people here prefer readability over correctness. What is wrong with you? Readability is optional. Correctness is not. That’s obviously the wrong tradeoff. Never outright manipulate your data to make it more readable! If you can’t make your data readable enough without manipulating it you just can’t present your data that way. Period. Find a better way. (I do not think there is any…

Two reasons: 1. The numbers are right there for all to see. 2. Nielsen's business is not to make academic-grade charts. Their version is far, far better for their customers' needs.

Having worked in newspapers creating graphics exactly like this, my editors would have made me publish a correction explaining this mistake. It was always my understanding that if I made a number of errors like this, I'd quickly find myself looking for a job.

A statistics and data-driven company like Nielsen should be ashamed, double so if they haven't published a correction.

Re: Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS

#68

Post by baconner »

damoncali wrote: post #65
baconner wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse IMO.

Why is that bad? They look at a nice, easy to read but disproportionate chart, come up with an idea that helps advance their cause, and work it into their presentation. That is how it's done, and it does not require mathematical rigor or loose ethics. This is apparently a very offensive line of reason here, judging by the downvotes I've acquired for pointing this out. I find that to be interesting in its own right.

I try to assume ignorance over malice which is why I characterized our hypothetical middle-managers as clueless rather than intentionally using misleading data in my prior comment.

If the case is that they know the data is incorrect/misleading but they use it anyway to advance a cause that sounds like the kind of internal politicking that cripples many larger businesses' ability to make good decisions. So IMO that's worse than just being clueless and I no don't think it's very ethical.

Now maybe you're saying that it's possible to get the right idea from a misleading chart and get some value from it. That's true, but it's also true that you can get the wrong idea from it and make a poor decision.

ps. didn't downvote you btw.

Re: Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS

#69

Post by janardanyri »

Foomandoonian wrote: post #66

This story used to be called 'Why is Nielsen misrepresenting smartphone market share?' I thought that was a brilliant headline, and it made me jump into the conversation here. I doubt the new title, 'Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS', would have caught my eye. Why do the titles on HN keep getting neutered?

Headline cleverness is a zero sum game. I'd rather have drier titles instead of a psychological hacking competition, and scan for content quality (as loosely indicated by upvotes) and subject relevancy.

Re: Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS

#70

Post by chris_wot »

damoncali wrote: post #65
baconner wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse IMO.

Why is that bad? They look at a nice, easy to read but disproportionate chart, come up with an idea that helps advance their cause, and work it into their presentation. That is how it's done, and it does not require mathematical rigor or loose ethics. This is apparently a very offensive line of reason here, judging by the downvotes I've acquired for pointing this out. I find that to be interesting in its own right.

It's bad even for those customers who want a result, because they will be hoping that the reputation of the firm reprinting the data will cause others to neglect looking into the figures.

Look what happened here: if either RIM or Microsoft were relying on the data to be under-analysed (not saying they were - just an example!) then it would have blown up in their face fairly spectacularly. And Neilsen is a reputable firm!

Try looking up the Mindcraft Windows NT vs. Linux benchmarks also.

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