As word of plummeting sales of Apple Watch spread around last week, an entrepreneur went on Medium to sing a different tune: his survey apparently uncovered a "paradox" - Apple Watch users are "overwhelmingly satisfied, yet not recommending" the product.
The "overwhelming" bit comes from this chart:
This data portray a hugely successful product in which almost nobody expressed any negative feelings.
This next chart is even more impressive. Apparently, "more than 94% of the people" are still wearing their Apple Watches daily! The researcher stated: "In this study, only 1% of our respondents have stopped wearing their Apple Watches." Wow!
Of course, in the world of data, there is a pretty reliable rule: "if it's too good, it's probably not true".
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The researcher did also mention this little trivia: "Of course we expect the vast majority of our panelists who have stopped wearing Apple Watch have also stopped responding to our survey."
This was the perfect example for the class I was teaching this week, in which we discuss the idea that huge amounts of tracking data will supplant surveys in the future. Tracking data is the perfect example of what Hans Rosling calls "bags of numerators without denominators". Tracking data only tracks events that happen. This survey only gets responses from people who are wearing the Watch. You are not going to learn anything about the people who have stopped wearing the Watch, nor are you going to learn anything about the events that did not happen.
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