All That I Know (About Technology)

I’m a big fan of TV comedies. One of my favorite new shows is Modern Family on ABC. The show focuses on the lives of three families; each episode typically has 3 story lines that are woven together. On last night’s episode (called Game Changer), one of the three story lines focused on the iPad. One of the main characters on the show, Phil, was planning to stand in line this Saturday to buy an iPad, the latest gadget from Apple. Since it was Phil’s birthday, his wife offered to stand in line for him but she fell back asleep, thus not making it to the Apple store in time. Eventually, the family figures out how to get Phil the iPad so all ends well. But during the closing scene, Phil proclaims his love for the iPad as his wife walks behind him, which she mistakenly takes as a complement for her.

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The demise of Flash has been prognosticated ever since Steve Jobs showed off the new iPad and explained that Flash support is not planned for the device. Instead, Apple chose to go with HTML5. This sparked a debate battle between Flash and HTML5. From a technology point of view, Flash is behind the times (in the same way that Google Gears is behind the times) because the HTML5 technology solves the problem of having a separate application to support rich media. But from my perspective, the death of Flash will not be driven by technology alone.

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As a technologist who’s focused on marketing, I love stats (short for statistics) because they help me tell a story. But as a former researcher, I’m very familiar with the famous quote by humorist Mark Twain:

“Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.”

At last night’s AiMA event on search engine strategies, the speakers referenced a study where users showed no significant preference to Bing or Google. After a short web search (via Google), I found the research paper by the Catalyst Group (see below). In the study, users reported that they wouldn’t switch from their current search engines even though Bing possessed some favorable improvements to Google. Read more…