Photo: Engadget
Apple boss Steve Jobs is the king of snakeoil salesmen, and his Macworld Expo keynote included a great example of manipulation. Check his chart of US Smartphone Marketshare, for example. Yes, the green Apple segment (19.5%) really is bigger than the Other segment (21.2%), which is also out of order, by size.
Someone must have figured out that you could make Apple look better by putting it at the front, by tilting the pie chart backwards, and possibly by moving Other. Job is famous for his attention to detail, so did he really not notice? Or did he say: "Hey, great idea"?
Another great piece of deception is deciding to illustrate market share by brand. Anybody who wanted an honest appraisal of the market would look at it by operating system, because there are several operating sytems used by many different smartphone suppliers. The leading ones are Symbian, Linux, and Windows Mobile.
We know that Symbian dominates the world smartphone operating system market (below), but it's weak in the US. How about Windows Mobile? Well, that makes up a chunk of Other, thanks to firms such as HTC, and it makes up a chunk of Palm, and Motorola also supplies phones running Windows Mobile. It's reasonable to ask what you get if you add these together, and there's some indication on the chart below (N.AM).
But you're certainly not going to get Jobs standing on stage showing Microsoft's share of in the US smartphone market if it's as big as Apple's!
Everybody appreciates that the iPhone has been a spectacular success in a very short time. Why not present that success fairly and honestly? Why isn't that "the Apple way"?
Charts from Canalys as used in the Symbian Market Round-up (PDF), via Simon Judge.
Charles Arthur adds: here (below) is what it would have looked like had he done it in 2D (rather than 3D, angled with the base towards you). Created in Keynote 08, in case you're wondering.
