You Don't Own Your Home

Just a quick annoyance after the last post...

According to another article at NPR's website, 65% of Americans own a home.

No.

This is nitpicking to an extent, but I think it's an example of euphemistic marketing at a societal level. If you pay monthly on a mortgage, you do not own your home. The bank owns your home. If you stop paying, they will have you removed from the property that they own.

The same applies to automobiles, though I less often hear the same mistake made in that context. If I ask someone if they own their car, they will often specify that they are making payments on it, implying they don't yet own it. If I ask someone if they own their home, the same distinction is not usually made and mortgage payments somehow constitute ownership.

Bottom line, you only truly own your home when your mortgage is paid off.

Correlation does not imply causation

NPR had a story on yesterday in which they interviewed a potential home buyer and an expert -- I missed the beginning of the report so I'm unclear on the expert's background, but it doesn't matter. What he had to say was rediculous in any case.

The home buyer was lower income and looking at homes in range of $90,000. The expert was explaining the benefits of home ownership and the apparent need to expand home ownership even to those who are financially challenged and may have issues buying a home.

The expert explained that there are benefits beyond the normally cited investment and tax benefits. He said that home owners are more likely to, for example, have a college degree. The implication was that owning a home would help you or your kids get a college degree.

No.

Home owner's are more likely to have college degrees, more money, etc. There is correlation between those things and owning a home, but no demonstrated causation that owning a home leads to those things. It's much more likely that those things made owning a home possible.

I would expect more from an "expert" and more from a "journalist"... OK, in this day and age, anyone can be a journalist, but I would expect news organizations such as NPR to put some effort into featuring people with some investigate talent that actually question such silly statements instead of just parroting whatever they're told.

Microsoft's Clackity Commercials

I had lunch with my father recently and he mentioned the cool Microsoft commercial with the "clack, clack, clack" sounds and the guy bouncing his entire body off a table with one hand.

This little bit of conversation with my father, who is just a "normal" user with simple web, email and photo saving needs, brought some points up about Microsoft's advertising.

The Surface commercials are certainly memorable and my dad likes them (so do I for entertainment value). I think they brought Microsoft back into his mind in a positive way. But it isn't clear what product the commercial was actually for or why anyone would want it. Sure, you can tell it's for some kind of computer, but that's not specific enough to let people know why they should care. He (and frankly I) are long past our days of loudly slamming things around the room while we dance around, jumping on furniture or bouncing around on one hand. I know what a Surface is and the only thing I take from Microsoft's commercials is that they're exceptionally proud of their snap-on keyboards and the loud clack sound they make when snapping on.

Our conversation ended with that, but my mind wandered over to Samsung's recent commercials. I think Samsung is doing a better job of walking the line between entertaining and memorable and actually showing at least one thing that you can actually do with their product. Sure, I might think that one thing is inconsequential (file sharing by touching devices) or misleading (e.g. two apps open at once) but it's good marketing.

Screen Sizes

Andy Ihnatko has recently switched from an iPhone to an Android phone for a few reasons, not least of which is the availability of larger screens on many Android phones.

It's a valid point. Industry analysts (what do they really analyze?) have been calling for Apple to release larger screens on iPhones for some time.

It's not as straight forward as they pretend though. Is a larger screen just a scaled version of the current iPhone (same resolution)? If it is, then Apple must address image quality concerns since it may no longer be a "retina" display. If the resolution is increased to maintain retina quality, the platform is fractured and development becomes more difficult. Apple may believe the current losses to Android based on screen size don't justify the difficulties.

I find discussions on screen size interesting -- the same user that wants a large screen on their phone may also want a small screen on their laptop for different reasons. A small screen laptop is usually a low weight laptop and the technophiles I read and listen to in podcasts will cite weight as a major concern.

I prefer a small phone that fits in my pants pocket. I do not wear tactical cargo pants like Andy Ihnatko... I don't think I know anyone who does. When I've seen someone carrying a Samsung Note, I don't see them putting it in their pants pocket. They are literally carrying it, like a tablet. For my laptop, I prefer large screens. If I were a 9 year old girl, the difference between carrying a 3 pound laptop and a 6 pound laptop might matter to me, but I worked out a bit during and after college, so that extra few pounds really doesn't impact my day.

File Under Useless Surveys

Survey: Most Developers Now Prefer HTML5 For Cross-Platform Development

Surprising, a company that makes development frameworks for working with various HTML5 era technologies did a survey that found the majority of those surveyed preferred creating mobile apps using HTML5 over using development frameworks native to each platform.

The study appears to draw erroneous conclusions about mobile cross platform development by presenting mobile cross platform development questions primarily to desktop website developers. A concluding statement for the study could have been, "Desktop website developers prefer HTML5 technologies for cross platform development, indicating that HTML5 is more popular than native development on mobile devices".

The issue with a survey like this, and the reason a company takes no issue with providing a bad survey, is that many people will believe it. They don't have the time or the inclination to question it or the article that glosses over it.

The article correctly points out the bias in the survey resulting from asking developers who are highly likely to already be experienced in and doing HTML5 development whether they plan to use HTML5 for development in 2013.

The study conclusions list the perceived difficulty of developing for various platforms. I think this is an irrelevant ranking -- you develop for where your desired users are and there are still platforms where there are fewer users (Microsoft mobile). The notion that Microsoft products are easier to develop for isn't really important at this stage. The study indicates the developers were asked only to respond for platforms they had worked with. The truth is that few developers have worked with multiple platforms to a great degree and I suspect that the difficulty level tracks experience level more than anything else. It wouldn't be ideal, but the study should have asked for experience level on each platform so that developers that, for example, spent a weekend trying to learn a platform were weeded out.

The study notes that 60% of the planned development from those surveyed is for desktop "apps". The term "app" has officially been appropriated to mean all software with a user facing UI because people making desktop applications or websites were upset they weren't a part of the mobile app revolution. If most of the developers are targeting desktops for business use (I'm assuming the business use part based on "productivity" apps being the most prevalent app type and that 71% of those surveyed worked in medium or enterprise businesses), is it really surprising that they would show a bias toward using HTML5 on Windows or that they would consider the platform they are already working with to be the easiest to develop for?

Lastly, if most of the "apps" being created by those surveyed are for business productivity, it wouldn't be surprising that HTML5 is valued -- business productivity is about spending as little money as possible to provide a functional product. These are the bullet points HTML5 products are expected to hit. Ease of use and user experience are rarely on the list of goals (at least not seriously).