Finally catching up on my RSS feeds, I ran across a post on Dare Obosanjo’s blog. He posted a comparison chart for the stock prices of Apple, Microsoft, and Google, under the catchy title “Race to the bottom”
This didn’t exactly jive with my recollection - I follow these stocks on a daily basis (and hold a bit of AAPL), and that didn’t look at all like the image my mind had.
So I went to Yahoo and did a comparison chart over a slightly longer period (a year, instead of three months), and right up to the current point in time.
And suddenly both Apple and Google outperform Microsoft quite handily. Now, to be clear, I’m not accusing Dare of trying to distort the truth - I’m using this as an example that shows how easily truth can be distorted by graphs. For all I know, Dare is simply posting a picture somebody else sent him, without checking the data - it’s tagged as mindless link propagation, after all.
Just goes to show - if you have to rely on data, better double check yourself.
Update: I’m guilty of the same thing myself - I didn’t notice Dare actually posted this back in February. Showed up in my new items, so I treated it as new. I guess it’s more mindless link propagation on my part….
So here’s a one-year chart that also ends at the same time.
