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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

> Revenue - Down and to the right

How could a revenue curve move in any other direction than to the right? A revenue curve that loops back on itself and starts moving to the left, back in time?

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also known as 'up and to the left'

> up and to the left

The x axis is time. How can you move to the left, back in time?

You can move back in time using this device we call "memory". Up and to the left - value grows as you consider earlier values. Up and to the right - value grows as you consider newer values. Yes considering newer values after older ones is a reasonable default but it's not completely redundant to specify that's what's meant.

Hint: it's a joke.

Have you ever done one of those DNA kits? I feel as though you might have some Vulcan in you.

You are free to read a graph on any direction you want.

I think it's just a throwaway reference to "back and to the left", a frequently parodied line from the movie JFK.

If that's it, you just answered my (same as GP's) permanent confusion for people describing the "hockey stick" chart as "up and to the right". Why not just "up"?? Thanks for that!

Down could be a single quarter. Down and to the right implies many quarters or a line angled down.

They key there is the down part.

Yeah so why specify 'to the right'?

"Up and to the right" is a relatively common business saying to indicate things are going well and that the chart for a metric (ex: revenue, users, etc) is going "up and to the right". The author made a play on this common business phrase by saying IBM's charts are going "down and to the right"

Well, conceivably, if the total value were to drop to 0 in a very short amount of time, it would be simply “down” (and the inverse, for the far more unlikely event that it increased a few orders of magnitude all at once and then flatlined, appearing to simply go “up”).

The phrase "up and to the right" is common in business discussions to indicate "good metrics." It's a play on that, which similarly has "to the right" superfluously in your opinion.

I've heard this term for 20+ years and never questioned it until just now. I think the "to the right" part is meant to convey that profits going up is not just a one time thing, but something that has, or will be happening continually over a period of time.

Because we perceive "to the right" as making progress/happening over time with respect to a cartesian coordinate-based graph.

You are correct, it's redundant. Down and to the right sounds like the sort of thing a sell side analyst or salesperson would say. It could be that you are assuming your audience are unfamiliar with stock graphs, but more likely you are using redundancy for rhetorical effect. In another section the author describes the performance of IBM against a benchmark as 18,736 basis points, which he calculates by taking the arithmetic difference of a positive return and a negative return (ugh). This just means underperformance of 187.36%. I suspect though once again the use of a 5 digit basis points figure is a rhetorical flourish. These are just rhetorical nits though. I did enjoy the article, and the numbers and their sources are very clear.

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