The Occasional Blargh!

Debbie Schlussel just wants to be offended.

nobody@vox.com(Sterling Ambivalence) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 05:12:46 -0400

There's just something about the abject foolishness in this Tinker Bell complaint from Debbie Schlussel that irks me. It has irked me enough to even write a post here on LiveJournal. (All the peeps who have me on their LJ friends lists know how hard it is to get me to post something here.)

The stupidity gets a running start with the very first sentence:

Either Disney is trying to appease “modest” Muslims or they’ve gone the way of the rest of Hollywood and are trying to make their feminine characters more masculine.

Somehow, she has it in her head that Hollywood is making its female characters more male. I really want to see what is leading her to this bizarre conclusion. The very manly shorty-short jeans worn by Megan Fox in Transformers II? Miley Cyrus playing dress-up as Miss Rock Star Hanna Montana? Did the Gossip Girls start wearing Camo? Was there less cleavage on MTV this summer? Hollywood must be sending different movies to her town.

And maybe the Evil Radical Muslims have her in their misinformation campaign as well, unless she thinks a hat and a short skirt is an acceptable substitute for a hijab and a burka.

But you know what, she has not watched Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure. I'm pretty sure Disney does not send her screener DVDs. She is in a snit about one picture of the character -- it's not even a shot from the movie. Amazon.com has several stills posted from the movie posted on its product page. There are five pictures of Tinker Bell available on Amazon, four of which where you can see her outfit. Only one of those four show Tink in her Robin Hood adventurer outfit. It's less of a redesign than of a woman getting dressed up in mission appropriate clothes. Maybe Tink wears the outfit for a significant portion of the film, but unless Schlussel can go on an archeology mission in a cocktail dress, she has no standing to complain.

And it's a funny argument Debbie Schlussel has made: a woman with more than one outfit is unfeminine.

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Shallow Analysis. . .

nobody@vox.com(Sterling Ambivalence) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:05:37 -0400

Never mind that Microsoft sold essentially only that version of Windows for five years. Way to go, Marco.

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Funny Numbers

nobody@vox.com(Sterling Ambivalence) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 11:01:47 -0400

I am surprised I didn't comment on Net Applications. About two months ago at the start of August, Net Applications announced that its previously reported usage share numbers were erroneous, but without going into further detail publicly. This came after they never published its June report, which would have normally been released at the start of July. I did talk about it elsewhere, but not here. After a couple of comments in various places, I forgot about it just as most others have. I didn't have reason to think about it again.

Not until Josh Marshall brought it back up.

In reporting the statistics for visitors to his website, Talking Points Memo, he repeated that dubious statistic: "about 10% of people [use] Macs". It's not his error, and the statistic is an aside to his actual point. But it shows how the internet can continue to spread questionable information, even after it has been corrected. Though in this case, the correction came eight months later. In fact, this misinformation was compounded by more misinformation for six additional months. Actually, the questionable methodology was driving reporting for years.

These reports could have driven the behavior of others. It might have induced more coverage of Macs in the regular tech press and even the general press. That might have encouraged more people to buy Macs. That might have caused Microsoft to panic and begin to hammer back with advertising. That might have even encouraged hackers and criminals to start to look for ways to attack OS X.

Now, rereading the piece written by Philip Elmer-DeWitt of CNNMoney/Fortune comes an allegation more troubling. According to Net Applications, the problems in its data come simply from sampling errors. It says that they have been undersampling international traffic, thus magnifying American trends, thus the general overreporting of usage of Apple products. Howver, in what is essentially a footnote to the piece not followed upon, a few people commenting at Geek.com allege that NetApplication adjusts the data for the benefit of its clients. This is a far more damning accusation. For rather than misakes being made, NetApplications is accused of essentially cooking the books. This is a question that needs to be looked into.

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Chowder

nobody@vox.com(Sterling Ambivalence) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:10:50 -0400

Tis a bit of old news, but John Gruber has been getting a bit of ribbing lately for a few prognostication failures and reporter errors of late. Dan Lyons, roleplaying as Steve Jobs has had a field day tweaking him. Via that same Fake Steve Jobs, there's the discovery of a blog on Tumblr called Things John Gruber is Wrong About. That's not to say Gruber isn't a smart man. He couldn't possibly be as successful as a pundit based outside of the technology press (and perhaps even outside of Silicon Valley) without having a good deal of smarts. However, snark is easy. Punditry is harder, provided your goal is getting stuff right. Reporting, which is far more a fact-finding mission, is hardest of all.

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Princesses in Spandex. . .

nobody@vox.com(Sterling Ambivalence) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:08:59 -0400

Here is a semi-contrarian view of the Disney purchase of Marvel which kind of expands on criticisms I have of Disney as well. Disney is buying entry into a market it has been dead to for about a decade. Surprisingly, I didn't make a snide joke about it in my brief post noting it, I've been telling people who would here me that Disney has hit a brick wall; the people they seem able to relate to are tween and teen girls. I would not be surprised to learn that they have a last ditch project in the Imagineering Labs to make young boys look and behave more like young girls. That would explain the Jonas Brothers.

As recently as the 90s, Disney could themselves release films that were broad, critically acclaimed hits. Today's Disney can be described as selling fairy tale princesses to girls. What is remarkable is how much its other properties (with the obvious exception of ESPN) has femmed up. ABC TV is essentially the WB Network for grown ups (h/t Jaime Weinman). The Disney Channel, which used to be home to shows like Jet Jackson, The Jersey and Even Stevens (starring a pre-Transformers Shia LeBeouf) is now almost entirely devoted to shows starring future female Disney pop stars. Miley Cyrus. Selena Gomez (summary). Again, the Jonas. And for all of the work Disney spent relaunching little watched Toon Disney into Disney XD as a male counterpart to The Disney Channel, XD is still far more popular with girls. (Curiously, it may be because they write the boys in XD shows as having doubts and insecurities, which would make them more appealing to girls than boys. Quote the article: "Amid their tomfoolery, the lead characters sometimes turn to the camera to agonize over decisions, expressing self-doubt in a way that is reassuring to girl audiences,")

For this entire decade, Disney could not pay a boy to partake in entertainment from the castle branded company. Now the House of Mouse pins its hopes on the House of Ideas, though critics will note the ideas are still 30 plus years old. They will still need good people to execute those ideas. Whether or not Marvel has those people remain to be seen,

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Subtle distinctions. . .

nobody@vox.com(Sterling Ambivalence) — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 20:36:10 -0400

I skimmed the article earlier and missed this sentence in the very first paragraph of the article about NPD's Apple numbers:

"According to NPD, in June, nine out of 10 dollars spent on computers costing $1,000 or more went to Apple."

That's a very different statement than saying Apple has 91% of that market segment. This was pointed out to me by this article on The Apple Blog (not an Apple Inc. blog), which explained the difference with this example, where Apple can get that 91% by selling exactly as many computers as its competition:

Consider the example where two people go to a Best Buy. One buys a PC for $1,045, the other a Mac for $1,455. At this point the Mac and PC market share is equal (one each, 50 percent). But now let’s look at the “dollars spent on computers costing $1,000 or more”, which total $500. PC got $45 (9 percent), while Mac got $455 (91 percent).

A very subtle change in wording can have a dramatic difference in meaning. The example is flawed in that he treats selling price as though it was a graduated income tax were only dollars above $1000 counts as spent, which I don't think NPD was saying. But the point remains that Apple could sell the exact same number of machines (or even fewer) and still get a higher revenue share by selling more expensive machines.

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Pouring gasoline on an electronics fire. . .

nobody@vox.com(Sterling Ambivalence) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:15:38 -0400

I can already see the internet reaction to this assessment by NPD. they of the statistic that Apple has 91% of the over $1000 computer notebook market.

“Is this true? How is it possible? NPD vice president of industry analysis Stephen Baker says it’s simple: “The average price of a non-netbook Windows PC is under $600. It’s hard to see what functionality you could add to a Windows notebook to make it worth $1,200 to $1,500 to someone.”

So what is Apple giving people for an extra thousand or two thousand dollars? “Apple is giving them Apple,” Baker said. “They’re the only ones willing to sell computers at that price level. They’re like Mercedes that way. In tech, we tend to think performance is most important, but most people want functionality. Yet there are lots of people who want to say, ‘I want to be cool and drive around in a fancy car.’ An Apple computer makes you cool, it makes other people jealous.”

I know people like that -- who compare OS X to Rolexes or fine wines or Lexuses or Mercedes. They drive me up the wall, and do more to prove the perception that Macs are the brand-name machine for the Williamsburg dicks who shop at Abercrombie. Now, is this true for the majority of their consumers? I doubt it, but in much the same way as the highly vocal racists and birthers and protest Galts are making the Republican party look bad to us outsiders, the outspoken Mac zealots make it difficult to comfortably use any brand of computer without defensiveness. And in the same way that shameless GOP pandering to its crazy base is an abject abdication of its responsibility, the same goes for Apple's pandering to its base -- though both has been doing it so long, they do not know how to ease off.

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Steve's Telephone. . .

nobody@vox.com(Sterling Ambivalence) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 05:09:40 -0400

I have no idea what Steve Jobs was thinking back in 1995, but I do remember what he was still thinking in 1984 when he hired Chiat/Day to create a wonderful commercial that defined the personal computer revolution. Who can forget the audience of reverent drones and the big screen on the stage? It used to be funny to note the similarity between the crowds in the old commercial and the audiences at Macworld Expo, sitting at the front of their seats in rapt attention and waiting for the big head on the screen to tell them what to think. The humor is slowly fading, though, and I can't help but feel that Apple's iPhone division has become everything the old company mocked in 1984.

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Culpa? Mea?

nobody@vox.com(Sterling Ambivalence) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 18:20:12 -0400

One thing missing from this MDN update: That they were wrong and "spreading misinformation" as well.

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Friends Again. . .

nobody@vox.com(Sterling Ambivalence) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 05:27:41 -0400

After the snark attack from three weeks ago, it looks like John and Joe are friends again. Though it may be because the sun is smiling on Apple today. Also: Joe on the rain disrupting Microsoft's parade.

Update: Marco rains on John's parade on the subject of Apple's 91% of the >$1000 PC market. It could be just retail.

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