September 2012
1 post
Quantifying the Impending iOS 6 Maps Backlash
Apple’s new Maps app is the very first item on their list of major new features in iOS 6, but for many iPhone and iPad users around the world those new maps are going to be a major disappointment.
In iOS 6, Apple no longer uses Google’s traffic, transit, or street view features, switching instead to their own traffic data, and adding turn-by-turn navigation and a 3D Flyover view. As...
May 2012
1 post
Are Smart Phones Spreading Faster than Any...
I’ve written an article with associated charts for Technology Review, tracking the adoption rate of mobile phones and their inevitable replacement, smart phones, relative to other similar technologies.
It really has been quite an astounding 30 years:
In 1982, there were 4.6 billion people in the world, and not a single mobile-phone subscriber. Today, there are seven billion people in the...
March 2012
1 post
Daisey's Upcoming Venues All Defend Him
As is now well known, Mike Daisey’s “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” has been performed since 2010 and covered by countless media outlets since, including This American Life which then retracted the story on the basis of reporting by Marketplace’s Rob Schmitz. Contrary to some coverage of the retraction, Daisey’s fabrications actually extended far beyond...
February 2012
2 posts
Five Problems For Tesla Motors
Tesla Motors has responded to my “It’s a Brick” post with a blog post of their own, “Plug It In”. I’m genuinely very glad to hear that the Model S and Model X are apparently going to be substantially less prone to “bricking” than the Roadster.
Unfortunately, the rest of Tesla’s response has been a somewhat bizarre mix of paranoia, smearing, “blame the...
“It’s A Brick” – Tesla Motors’ Devastating Design...
Tesla Motors’ lineup of all-electric vehicles — its existing Roadster, almost certainly its impending Model S, and possibly its future Model X — apparently suffer from a severe limitation that can largely destroy the value of the vehicle. If the battery is ever totally discharged, the owner is left with what Tesla describes as a “brick”: a completely immobile vehicle that cannot be started or...
October 2011
4 posts
Android Orphans: Visualizing a Sad History of...
The announcement that Nexus One users won’t be getting upgraded to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich led some to justifiably question Google’s support of their devices. I look at it a little differently: Nexus One owners are lucky. I’ve been researching the history of OS updates on Android phones and Nexus One users have fared much, much better than most Android buyers.
I went...
Roboto vs. Helvetica
Google announced the mouthful known as “Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich” today. The first bullet point of their presentation was a new system-wide font, Roboto. John Gruber quickly pointed out what had caught my eye as well: Roboto sure looks a lot like Helvetica, the typeface so famous they made a movie about it.
Notably, Helvetica was the default font of iOS until Apple switched to...
Google's Management Doesn't Use Google+
Management caring deeply about their company’s products and using them every day is almost always a prerequisite of making great products. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg really does use Facebook all day. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo tweeted at least 30 times just yesterday. At the other extreme, I started at Apple under Gil Amelio, who used to have his emails printed out for him. On that basis...
October 20, 2011: Android's 1 Million Device D-Day
“There are now over 500,000 Android devices activated every day, and it’s growing at 4.4% w/w” Andy Rubin June 28, 2011
By that measure, there should now be over 900,000 Android activations per day and October 20th should be the first day Google crosses the impressive milestone of 1 million activations in a single day:
They Made The Rules
From April 2010 until July...
September 2011
2 posts
Pick a Kindle, Any Kindle!
Four years ago Amazon introduced the original Kindle. Two years ago, there were just two models: the Kindle 2 and the large screen Kindle DX. After this week’s announcements, Amazon is now selling 14 different models under the Kindle brand.
The current Kindle lineup varies on no fewer than 11 different features by my count, with 2 to 5 possible variants for each of the 11 features. Many...
Fixing Your Facebook Timeline Privacy
Facebook has announced a new profile page layout called “Timeline” that will be launching for all users soon. Unfortunately, the timeline appears set to join the long history of Facebook privacy faux pas by making previously private information public. But don’t worry, all you have to do is follow these 9 not particularly simple steps and you can temporarily partially remedy the...
March 2011
3 posts
Digital Subscription Prices Visualized (aka The...
Here are the annual prices of a variety of services, all of which allow users to access the service from the web and across multiple devices with a single unified subscription. See if you can pick out which one is the outlier:
As Frédéric Filloux and others have pointed out, The New York Times pricing seems designed not to get people to subscribe digitally, but rather to discourage existing...
US Wealth Distribution Visualized
Another bad chart, this time from MoveOn.org:
The most obvious problem with this chart, as correctly identified by Neven Mrgan, is that it doesn’t provide a visual correlation between the population and wealth distributions. In fact, it doesn’t provide a visual display of the population distribution at all.
Here’s my attempt to respond to Mr. Mrgan’s complaint:
...
The Newspaper Business Implodes
The newspaper ad business isn’t looking any healthier than the recorded music business. Nor is it looking any less delusional.
Today, the Newspaper Association of America released ad statistics for 2010 along with a bizarrely cheery message from its president John F. Sturm, but the numbers paint an ugly picture.
Update: It seems the NAA has removed Sturm’s press release & all...
February 2011
3 posts
Those Optimistic Aussies at ARIA
I’m looking forward to the 2010 music sales numbers coming in. Australia’s ARIA has just reported and I haven’t done a deep dive on the numbers yet, but their press release might deserve as much analysis as the numbers themselves.
Headline: “Digital products provide greatest area of growth”
Response: That’s generous - digital products were the only area of growth. All 6 of your physical...
Album Prices
A brief addition to my earlier charts.
Some people have correctly observed that in the digital era the recording industry’s marginal production & distribution costs have gone down. This in turn might account for at least some of the revenue drop, potentially without affecting industry profits. While I don’t have good historical data on costs at the moment, we can look at the pricing of albums...
The Real Death of the Music Industry
A Bad Chart & Its Origins
In January, Bain & Company produced the following chart as part of their report on “Publishing in the Digital Age” (PDF):
Then on Tuesday, someone posted it on Flickr. Subsequently, Peter Kafka of Wall Street Journal’s MediaMemo noticed it and passed it along to Jay Yarrow, who made it Business Insider’s Chart of the Day on Wednesday under the title...
