contrasting business strategies of Apple and Canon

Apple started at the sumptuous end of the smartphone market and has moved down table.  Canon users, in contrast, have been firing bigger, more expensive Canons.  Canon users on flickr have shifted from 37% DSLR / 63% point-and-shoot in November, 2006 to 71% DSLR / 29% point-and-shoot in April, 2011.

Apple entices customers with one new iPhone model once a year, or longer.[*]  Canon, in contrast, fires out a barrage of camera models.  Among Canon cameras used on flicker, about 65 new Canon models have appear over the past two and a half years.

The new iPhone model seduces a large share of users of previous iPhone models.  Canon models seem to stay in use longer.  Consider the flickr Camera Finder data for April, 2011.  The report for Apple doesn’t include a separate line for the original iPhone that was released at the end of June, 2007. The iPhone 3G, which was released in July, 2008, has 3,406 users.  That figure probably includes original iPhone users.  The Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi, released in Aug. 2006, has 3,171 users.  The Canon model with the most users, the EOS Digital Rebel XSi, has about 4,000 users, as does the iPhone 4.  The EOS Digital Rebel XSi was introduced in January, 2008.  The iPhone 4, in contrast, was introduced about two and half years later.

Apple is one company producing smartphones with proprietary software.  Many vendors are producing smartphones on a rapid development cycle using Android, an open-source operating system.  The differences between Apple and the Android industry and between proprietary software and open-source software are significant.  But as the contrasts between Apple and Canon illustrate, even as a single company building devices with proprietary software, Apple’s business strategy is distinctive.

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Data: Apple and Canon user growth among flickr users (Excel version)

[*] The iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, and iPhone 4 came on market from 2007 to 2010 with yearly introductions about the end of June.  The iPhone 5 reportedly will not be on the market until the fall of 2011.

sex discrimination in child custody and child support

In child custody and child support administration, stereotype-based beliefs about the allocation of family responsibilities are both firmly rooted and largely unquestioned.  Suppose some desirable job involved much out-of-town travel.  Suppose, in hiring for that job, an employer discriminated in favor of fathers and against mothers, on the grounds that the best interests of the children favored mothers not doing extensive, out-of-town travel.  The employer most likely would be in violation of sex discrimination laws and subject to a costly legal judgment.  In contrast, “the best interests of the child” pretends to rationalize huge gender inequalities in state-awarded child custody and child support.

Sex inequalities in child custody and child support are about an order of magnitude larger than widely discussed sex inequalities in the labor force. From 1993 to 2007, about five mothers had child custody for every father with child custody.  Across that same period, about eight mothers were awarded child support for every father awarded child support. Among parents under a child support agreement, fourteen times more mothers received physical custody than did fathers.

Gender inequalities in labor force participation, in contrast, are much smaller.  Among parents ages 25 to 49 living with at least one own-child, three mothers worked full-time for every four fathers that did.  Among parents of those ages living with at least one own-child under age five, one mother worked full-time for every two fathers that did. Motherhood matters much less in the workforce than in courtrooms making child-custody or child-support decisions.

Most persons value their children more than their jobs.  Even if sex inequalities in child custody and child support were similar to sex inequalities in the labor force, the former sex inequalities would be more damaging than the latter.

Family-court substantive and procedural law should consider the actual sex bias in the administration of child custody and child support.  Men lack reproductive rights comparable to those that women have in U.S. constitutional law and in statutory laws governing child-birth registration, giving up a child for adoption, and safe-havens that allow a mother to give up a newborn safely, legally, and anonymously.  Sex inequalities in child-custody and child-support administration exacerbate sex inequalities in reproductive rights.

Child-support enforcement keeps roughly 50,000 persons in jail or in prison in the U.S. on any given day. Almost surely among those prisoners men outnumber women by eight to one or more.  Sex inequalities in child custody and child support are closely related to that sex inequality in punishment.[*]

Nothing is more important to most persons than their freedom and their children. State action deprives men of their freedom and their children with gross anti-men sex bias. Imprisonment and child-custody awards are the most significant areas of gender inequality today. Those areas deserve priority in promoting gender equality.

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Read more:

Data: custodial parents, parents awarded child-support, and labor-force participation by sex, 1993-2007 (Excel version)

Note:

[*] In Turner v. Rogers, the U.S. Supreme Court considered whether an indigent child-support obligor is entitled to a state-provided lawyer in a proceeding that will determine whether the obligor will be imprisoned. Turner v. Rogers is directly about the right to counsel.  However, sex inequalities in reproductive rights and in child-custody and child-support administration place Turner v. Rogers within an extraordinary but unquestioned field of unequal protection under law.

different faces of publicity

Various popular sayings claim that negative publicity is better than no publicity:

  • there’s no such thing as bad press
  • there’s no such thing as bad publicity but your own obituary (attributed to Brendan Behan)
  • the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about (attributed to Oscar Wilde and Joan Crawford)

According to a recent empirical study, negative reviews can increase sales of an unknown product by increasing product awareness.  Persons tend to prefer the familiar relative the unknown.  A negative review’s contribution to awareness can outweigh its effect on sentiment, particularly since sentiment tends to dissipate faster than awareness.[*]

The meaning of publicity and awareness are changing with the fragmentation of mass media and the rise of personal, Internet-based communication.  Mass-media publicity and awareness now do not necessarily delimit meaning.  Instead, mass-media publicity and awareness may prompt Internet search and further inquiry.  Bad publicity can lead some exposed person to find a much wider range of information.  On the other hand, the value of mass-media awareness probably has decreased relative to search-engine findability.  Publicity of the traditional sort is no longer necessary to connect with a large number of persons.

One conclusion you can count on: economic analysis will show that results depend.

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Video of Sokari Douglas Camp’s Masquerader with Boat Headdress (1987), on display at the National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC.  In the Kalabari culture of Nigeria, men perform masquerade performances honoring water spirits.

[*]  Jonah Berger & Alan T. Sorensen & Scott J. Rasmussen, 2010.  “Positive Effects of Negative Publicity: When Negative Reviews Increase Sales,” Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 29(5), pages 815-827, 09-10. DOI: 10.1287/mksc.1090.0557

making data more factually important

Most persons are primarily interested in using data to make their point.  Why persons seek truth non-instrumentally is a mystery from an evolutionary perspective.  That mystery need not serve as the basis for true enlightenment. A better basis for true enlightenment is a norm of credibility through data accessibility: if you use data to make a point, you must make sufficient, high-quality data freely available to analyze that point and related points.  If you don’t, your use of data should be considered pointless.

Open data platforms often have only superficial institutional support and face continual funding battles.  Vertical disintegration in data production, dissemination, analysis, and claim-making reduces upstream data-production incentives.  High-quality data can support a wide variety of insights and values.  Particular interests in it are relatively small.

Data ethics in academic scholarship are slowly developing.  While a small number of scholars do hugely important work in collecting, curating, and disseminating data, their work is greatly undervalued academically.  Data is likely to continue to be greatly undervalued in academic status competition.  A more propitious development is scholarly norms of data disclosure.  Providing data access is slowly becoming a requirement for taking scholarly claims seriously.

Most statistics quoted in general public discussion are uninterpretable or misinterpreted.  Much scholarly work follows disciplinary conventions that support objectively meaningless work.  But if such rhetoric and scholarship helps to generate high-quality data, its net effect on public discussion will be positive.