The Verge Tech Survey | Hacker News Reader

The Verge Tech Survey

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50 pointsjbernardo9517 comments

This may be a perfect example of the tech cage, where we fail to understand the opinions of those outside of the industry. I would be very interested to see the same survey provided to those who work in technology, especially in the Bay Area, to see how it skews.

Talk about selection bias. Amazing how they extrapolate this to headlines like "A third of America wouldn’t care if Twitter disappeared". Would be nice to know how the study was performed, and how the population sampled.

80% of the US population doesn't use Twitter. Why is it hard to believe that 33% wouldn't care if Twitter disappeared?

And "care" is ambiguous. People who loathe Twitter "care", not just people who like it.

In my opinion, Graphs seem hard to understand. For example, I wanted to compare "Greatly Trust" part of Amazon vs Your Bank in the first graph, but since both "Greatly Trust" sections start and end at different places, I can only compare them based on my raw senses but to me they look exactly equal, even if there might be a small difference.

Yeah the graphs here are a visual mess. Who decided on displaying the data this way?

The utility of Amazon is really apparent in these responses. I think the "how much would you care if company {x} disappeared" is one of the most interesting questions. I imagine this is how people feel about that:

Apple - iPhone / Mac loyal users would be disappointed but know that Android devices and PCs have gotten pretty good lately, not the end of the world.

Google - has all your online accounts, mail, calendar, docs, etc. Losing this would be a massive pain, but it's not too hard to imagine some other software company stepping into the void.

Amazon - the everything store. If this goes away many people will have to reorganize their physical lives. More trips to the store, back to waiting weeks (not days or hours) for niche items, paying more for almost everything. Most importantly, it's very hard to imagine any other company developing a logistics network like Amazon has.

I would have liked to see Uber/Lyft included in the survey. Although I have a pretty negative opinion of the "ridesharing" industry I can't really imagine what would happen to urban and suburban life if they just disappeared. So many of my plans these days rely on the fact that I can summon a car to take me somewhere without any planning, and it's not going to be horribly expensive.

I was surprised by Microsoft. I could see IT department heads missing Microsoft and XBox loyalists, but other than that, who would miss Microsoft? Did they survey a lot of people in Seattle?

Some of Microsoft overlaps Google (lots of people still use Outlook/Hotmail/Contacts/Calendar/Office/OneDrive/Skype/etc, it's kind of a pain to switch over everything)

The gaming community would loose an awful lot too. Not just PC Gamers, but most of the industry development tools and workflow are largely Windows-centric.

Let's not forget that Microsoft makes Windows. The most used desktop and laptop OS.

I'm sure a ton of games would be upset as well. The Steam hardware survey reports that a 96.6% of users are on some version of Windows.

For one that is survey of Verge users. Other thing is Windows users. I'm sure large portion of Windows users would've been fine with some Linux distro but they don't know it.

Almost all of those graphics are needlessly difficult to understand.

not so.

The amount of info being conveyed is not trivial. It's nature requires reader to think about what is being presented. There is likely not too many other options to more clearly visualize the data.

6 values for each company, and you want to convey relativity between the values of each company..

I was confused by the lack of consistency across each of the graphs.

"No Opinion/Don't care" is sometimes gray, sometimes yellow, and sometime orange.

And for some graphs, the negative reaction is on the left and others the negative reaction is on the right.

I wish these graphs weren't rasterized. They're a bit fuzzy on my display

First world reply to a first world problem.

Oh poor Twitter... practically useless.

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