XDA: “3 reasons people are moving from Windows 11 back to Windows 10”

Recently, StatCounter posted a chart showing that Windows 10’s market share is growing, while Windows 11’s is shrinking. This flies in the face of what Microsoft has planned, especially given how Windows 10’s end-of-life date is looming in the distance. As such, I wanted to do some research into the topic; did StatCounter’s statistics get things wrong? Or are people downgrading from Windows 11 to Windows 10? While there’s no way to state without a doubt that people are downgrading, I did find people with pain points with Windows 11 that might be contributing to the system’s downfall.

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Again, this is speculation on my part, but I can’t help but notice that the Windows 11 adoption rate began reversing in January 2024, when Microsoft began introducing and announcing new Copilot features. There’s a chance that people are turning back to Windows 10 to dodge the 24H2 update, either as individuals who dislike the tools or as businesses that don’t want to entrust their private data with artificial intelligence.

Simon Batt

Pretty embarrassing for Microsoft to be losing market share on their most recent OS – then again, Windows 11 has been a pretty embarrassing upgrade from Windows 10. In the three years since its release things have barely improved, while Microsoft seems completely oblivious to these challenges faced by consumers and focused on chasing wild AI dreams instead of polishing the OS and expanding hardware support. I expect adoption problems will only worsen as Microsoft adds more AI features, as these will require hardware upgrades many will be reluctant to perform – including corporate customers.

Semafor: “The incredible shrinking podcast industry”

Apple has quietly tightened its reporting of how many people listen to podcasts, sending shock waves through an embattled audio industry still reeling from the end of the COVID-era production bubble.

The shift, Apple wrote in a blog post, was technical: The dominant podcasting platform had begun switching off automatic downloads for users who haven’t listened to five episodes of a show in the last two weeks.

But while few users noticed the shift, some of the biggest podcasts in the world saw their official listener numbers drop dramatically. Long-running shows that publish frequently were hit particularly hard. A user who listened to a show like The New York Times’ The Daily a few times, subscribed, but stopped listening would continue to count as a download indefinitely. Even better under the old rules: For people who listened to a show, dropped off for a while, but started listening again later, Apple would automatically download every show in between. The arrangement drove big download numbers, a crucial metric for ad sales and a sign of the vast reach of podcasts as a medium.

Max Tani

The title is somewhat misleading, as podcasting hasn’t suddenly shrunk overnight, but was instead revealed to have been smaller than previously reported. Not exactly a novel issue, as I have written before on this blog, but a reflection of the constant hyping and inflated expectations that is associated with basically every new trend in tech circles.

Ethan Zuckerman: “How Big is YouTube?”

Here’s how this works: YouTube URLs look like this: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=vXPJVwwEmiM

That bit after “watch?v=” is an 11 digit string. The first ten digits can be a-z,A-Z,0-9 and _-. The last digit is special, and can only be one of 16 values. Turns out there are 2^64 possible YouTube addresses, an enormous number: 18.4 quintillion. There are lots of YouTube videos, but not that many. Let’s guess for a moment that there are 1 billion YouTube videos – if you picked URLs at random, you’d only get a valid address roughly once every 18.4 billion tries.

We refer to this method as “drunk dialing”, as it’s basically as sophisticated as taking swigs from a bottle of bourbon and mashing digits on a telephone, hoping to find a human being to speak to. Jason found a couple of cheats that makes the method roughly 32,000 times as efficient, meaning our “phone call” connects lots more often. Kevin Zheng wrote a whole bunch of scripts to do the dialing, and over the course of several months, we collected more than 10,000 truly random YouTube videos.

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Once you’re collecting these random videos, other statistics are easy to calculate. We can look at how old our random videos are and calculate how fast YouTube is growing: we estimate that over 4 billion videos were posted to YouTube just in 2023. We can calculate the mean and median views per video, and show just how long the “long tail” is – videos with 10,000 or more views are roughly 4% of our data set, though they represent the lion’s share of views of the YouTube platform.

Ethan Zuckerman

Fascinating method – and fascinating results! If these are anywhere near accurate, in 2023 there was a new YouTube video for every other person living on the planet! The stats also highlight the extreme inequality in traffic between a tiny minority of popular uploads and the typical YouTube video, which can’t even top 10,000 views.

Goldman Sachs Research: “The Risks of a Higher Rate Regime”

The Risk from Unprofitable Firms

In the corporate sector, investors might hesitate to continue financing unprofitable companies that they hope will pay off well down the road now that the opportunity cost has risen. The number of unprofitable firms has risen in recent decades, reaching almost 50% of all publicly-listed companies in 2022 (Exhibit 7, left)^[3]. The share of business activity that they account for is much smaller but still an economically meaningful 10% of total business revenues (Exhibit 7, right).

Unprofitable firms account for closer to 13% of capital spending and employment, and even just the smaller group of persistently unprofitable firms account for about 5% of employment (Exhibit 8).

Higher funding costs could force some of these companies to cut labor costs or even close. In previous research we found that unprofitable firms tend to cut capital spending more aggressively when faced with margin pressure, and we find they also cut labor costs more aggressively when hit with interest rate shocks (Exhibit 9, left). The larger risk is that some firms might simply have to close if their path to profitability is too distant. The exit rate of unprofitable firms is currently low by historical standards and has actually declined since the start of the pandemic, leaving it ample room to rise from here (Exhibit 9, right).

David Mericle & Ronnie Walker

Fascinating figures about the US economy: almost half of all listed companies are now unprofitable! Presumably an outcome of the near-zero interest rate regime that has dominated over the past decade, these companies can be expected to face increasing pressures to become profitable through comprehensive restructuring, or… go bankrupt or close down, contributing to higher unemployment and decreases in economic activity.

The Economist: “The lessons from America’s astonishing economic record”

If there is one thing that Americans of all political stripes can agree on, it is that the economy is broken. Donald Trump, who saw trade as a rip-off and his country in decline, came into office promising to make America great again. President Joe Biden is spending $2trn remaking the economy, hoping to build it back better. Americans are worried. Nearly four-fifths tell pollsters that their children will be worse off than they are, the most since the survey began in 1990, when only about two-fifths were as gloomy. The last time so many thought the economy was in such terrible shape, it was in the throes of the global financial crisis.

Yet the anxiety obscures a stunning success story—one of enduring but underappreciated outperformance. America remains the world’s richest, most productive and most innovative big economy. By an impressive number of measures, it is leaving its peers ever further in the dust.

Start with the familiar measure of economic success: gdp. In 1990 America accounted for a quarter of the world’s output, at market exchange rates. Thirty years on, that share is almost unchanged, even as China has gained economic clout. America’s dominance of the rich world is startling. Today it accounts for 58% of the G7’s gdp, compared with 40% in 1990. Adjusted for purchasing power, only those in über-rich petrostates and financial hubs enjoy a higher income per person. Average incomes have grown much faster than in western Europe or Japan. Also adjusted for purchasing power, they exceed $50,000 in Mississippi, America’s poorest state—higher than in France.

The Economist

Far from being convincing about ‘America’s astonishing economic record’, this article illustrates how easily you can draw flawed conclusions by cherry-picking data and relying on broad, but imprecise indicators. A higher income per person doesn’t mean much in a country with rising income inequality; higher efficiency and more patents doesn’t mean much if the gains from this productivity and innovation are amassed by the top 1% of earners and by corporations that are essentially monopolies with ballooning cash reserves.

Analytics at Meta: “Notifications: why less is more”

We had a hunch that such a trade-off should be avoidable: if users are more satisfied with their experience, we believe this would be reflected in usage gains too. We decided to keep the experiment of sending only a few notifications running for a year. And lo and behold: little by little Facebook usage started inching back up! After a year we saw that in the fewer notifications experience, users were using Facebook more — it just took a long time for user behavior to shift and less disruption led to high organic usage, which increased both user satisfaction and app usage. We wrote this blogpost to socialize this finding as we believe other data science teams outside Facebook could benefit from the same lessons we learnt:

1. Experiments in the very long-run can show different results than in the short run.
2. Sending only a few notifications and the most relevant ones (e.g. those predicted to receive a 5/5 rating in the survey mentioned above) can improve user sentiment and usage too in the long run.

Weijun C., Yan Q., Yuwen Z., Christina B., Akos L.

Seems a rather obvious insight that people become frustrated with high volumes of notifications, and after a short period of increased engagement they start to pay less attention to them. This is especially true as people tend to add more friends and follow more sources over time, and Facebook crams new features into the feed, both contributing to even more notifications. But it’s nice to see this confirmed with actual research and, as far as I understand from this post, implemented into real product changes at Facebook.

MKBHD 2022: “Blind Smartphone Camera Test”

The Best Smartphone Camera 2022!

It’s time to find out once with SCIENCE: What’s the best smartphone camera? https://vote.MKBHD.com

Marques Brownlee

Cool experiment! One of the issue with smartphone reviews are that you are getting a limited viewpoint, that of the reviewer, colored by their hidden preferences and subjective views. With a blind test though people don’t know the brand beforehand, so the results should be less influenced by preconceived expectations.