MrDave's (David Yack) Blog!

So am I the only one that is tired of companies releasing numbers that are shaped to spin their story of the day?

Simple fact – this blog post will be read by 100% of the blog post readers. So what – How’s that matter to anyone?

Everywhere we look there are numbers – Earnings Numbers, Earning Forecast, % of risky debt, Number of Downloads, Number of developers – Numbers though are meaningless if they aren’t put in context.

Maybe we need new disclaimers under a federal mandate anytime numbers are quoted – For example,  “Warning – The numbers presented herein may or may not matter to you at all or for that matter anyone – but they made us really proud so we are releasing them in a way that they sound really impressive.  To make them look even better, we are releasing them without context.  For example, we are going to tell you that N people did X, but were not going to tell you how many people could possibly do X! Simply because if we told you how many people exist, N might not look as impressive!  You have been warned…”

Statistics are like photos, only believe them if you created them.  Just like Photoshop can tweak a photo to make it look awesome, statistics can be shaped to deliver your own message.  Don’t believe me? Check out Amazon, they have a whole page of titles that focuses on this here.

This isn’t a new issue, most large companies fall into the trap at some point, including Microsoft, Google and others.  I have to thank Adobe though because their press release today just happened to catch my eye and remind me I really should blog about this.  Why did it catch my eye?  Because they said 1 Million developers downloaded the SDKs and 80% of online video’s are viewed using flash.  Mixed in with other Adobe information I might have not even raised an eye.  But this press release was all about the numbers – So it made me think – How do I really interpret these numbers.

First of all, congratulations to Adobe, they have found a niche  with Flash and PDF.  They should be proud, but proud in context.  That said, they are a piece of a pie, not the pie.

So what got me thinking?

1 Million Downloads of Developer SDKs – First, I confess I have downloaded one of their SDKs before, but I’m not building applications – so like blog reader statistics, do downloads translate to active developers?  Does it matter how many times SDKs are downloaded?  Is that a helpful number?  Not to me, I routinely download SDKs multiple times some as much as 4 –5 times as I install on different computers, or after I rebuild one.  I’m not saying the number is inaccurate, I’m just saying they don’t matter – What you really want to know is How many Developers, How many are hobbyist, how many are professionals,  and how many are building full applications vs how many are building a UI widget, what % increase is that over some prior period, what’s the Total number of possible developers that exists.   Those are some things metrics that matter.

80% of all video’s  - If you had asked me a year or two ago , I would have estimated that number to be really close to 100%  – What they don’t tell you is that number growing, or shrinking. Clearly that number is under attack, but stating that doesn’t spin well.   Recently, some high visibility properties have been playing what I call the cell phone provider game.  You know that’s where you use the one that has the best deal at the time.  The Major League Baseball switch from Silverlight is a great example – clearly either Silverlight or Flash could handle their requirements.  But by switching to Adobe, MLB got to ride the free press express. So what do we really want to know?  I want to know things like why are 20% not using flash?  Is flash the easiest to integrate if I’m a non Adobe development shop?  Would 80% of the people watching the videos care what player is used?

My point is not to pick on Adobe, I just did because they were the most recent to fall into the number trap.  I think that all vendors should sign up to be more transparent with their statistics (including competitive technologies). More important, vendors should signup to deliver metrics that matter and not metrics that spin a story. While I’m at it, if your looking at an 3rd party analyst report, make sure they are truly independent.  I love how on CNBC now often times when analysts speak about a company they say “Company X has been a client of Analyst Y sometime in the past year”.  If you can’t produce metrics that matter, leave them as a download counter on your page!

A final thought…with hard drives becoming so large, remind me a gain why there’s downloads of any of these things and they aren’t just all pre-installed?