Lying with pictures - Nokia, RIM and Microsoft more fucked than they looked

[andrewducker]

As steer and drplokta pointed out yesterday, the Nielsen diagram was grossly out of proportion, so it looked like RIM and MS were better than they were.

I passed the data to steer, who then played around with R (code is in the other post), and produced the second diagram. I've tried to line them up and proportion them with each other as best as I can. So you can now easily see how misrepresentative the original diagram was!

Edit:
Also - an even better one made by http://9to5mac.com/2012/07/13/nielsen-needs-to-work-on-their-graphics/

Comments

[steer.livejournal.com]

Clearly your journal is widely read as I immediately got an email from these guys who were "there first" and got a more attractive diagram closer to the original.

http://9to5mac.com/2012/07/13/nielsen-needs-to-work-on-their-graphics/

Incidentally, the part in my previous email about needing a monitor to display a square as a square for the areas to be right was incorrect (a product of working at odd hours and sleeping badly). I constructed the squares that way but if everything changed aspect ratio it would not affect the proportionality of the areas.

[andrewducker]

I'm at the top of Hacker News right now:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4246673

:->

[steer.livejournal.com]

Congratulations... (that might also explain why the 9to5 mac guys were so keen to get theirs linked).

I noted some people complaining about "jagged" fonts in the png -- you could link to the pdf if you wanted.


http://www.richardclegg.org/graphics/phoneshare.pdf

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

But the graph that is really telling is not 'market share by manufacturer', it's 'share of profit by manufacturer'. No point selling loads of phones if you're making beans on them.

[andrewducker]

I'm confused. Are you saying that the numbers are for the market share, but the picture is for the profit share?

Because it doesn't say that anywhere on it, and that would _also_ be horribly confusing.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

No, I am saying that the share of profit graph is totally different -- and tells a quite different story. Hang on:

http://www.asymco.com/2012/02/03/first-apples-rank-in-mobile-phone-profitability-and-revenues/

This data report is from February but using 2011 data, showing Apple with a 9% share of units sold, a 38% share of revenue (consistent with your graph above), and a 75% share of profits.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

And according to this story, Apple & Samsung have 99% of mobile phone profits between them, which I can well believe.

[andrewducker]

Aaah, I'm not nearly so interested in how much profit the company is making.

It is amazing how much the market share has increased in the last year or so - iOS and Android have basically swallowed up all the other operating systems.

Treemapping

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

Me, I'd just have used dd to create some appropriately sized empty files and then taken a screen cap of WinDirStar / Baobab...

</sloth>

Re: Treemapping

[andrewducker]

I did something similar with Google's visualisation tools. But it doesn't produce vertical columns, as the slices are both horizontal and vertical.

Re: Treemapping

[steer.livejournal.com]

Ah... I'm much too lazy for that kind of thing. It's quicker for just one graph but I know I'm going to be needing a few visualisations in the near future and doing things by hand over and again is much less trouble than learning to use a new package.

I always tell my students, a good programmer is lazy in a clever way.