Hello! And welcome to our Friday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCRWireless.com to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way. We hope you enjoy it!
And without further ado:
PowerPoint presentations have become a necessary evil in modern business as it seems no amount of information can be exchanged during a meeting without having it powered by Microsoft’s digital white board.
PowerPoint also seems to allow for those who left behind a pauper’s future in graphic design to strut their stuff using 1980s graphics.
Unfortunately, for those of us not so gifted, PowerPoint’s remain a struggle to insert interesting information into a digital format that sucks the interest out of just about any non-animation information. The only chance those of us have is through the use of numbers, which we can all agree are much more exciting to look at than letters.
Those efforts to inject awesome numbers pertaining to the wireless space recently received their latest boosts as a pair of “reports” full of forward-looking numbers were released targeting the mobile space. Ericsson last week released its “Mobility Report: Global 4G/LTE divide will be wide in 2019,” while Cisco this week unveiled a new portion of its annual “Visual Networking Index,” that tries to paint a picture of Internet network growth trends.
These reports are chock full of numbers predicting what will happen and how much those happenings will make the world a better place. They really are great. Sure, most of those numbers were derived from animals throwing darts at a chart, but people love to look at numbers regardless of how silly they are. I mean look at the number 87. It just looks like a joke, doesn’t it?
More importantly, these reports are full of numbers that have become the bedrock of PowerPoint presentations everywhere, providing a sort of safety blanket of information. We have seen these numbers beaten into our heads a million times in presentations to the point that we have come to assume that the numbers are infallible. If Cisco says there will be 10 billion connected water buffalo by next week, it must be true.
But, the best part of these reports is when they have numbers that don’t quite align with each other. For instance:
–Ericsson predicts that by next year the “total number of mobile subscriptions will exceed the world’s population.”
–Cisco, on the other hand, predicts that by 2018, “there will be 2.7 networked devices/connections for every person on Earth, up from 1.7 per capita in 2013.” And that “there will be nearly one M2M connection per person by 2018.”
I guess there are ways to parse out these numbers so that they can seem to perhaps be similar, but that would require the use of monkeys to use words, and we have already decided that numbers are better than letters.
I would say that it’s probably worth your time to go ahead and download these reports now just so you could have a head start in memorizing the information, but then again doing so would remove some of the “excitement” of having these new “facts” drilled into your skull over the next year. Why wreck such fun?
Also, we will all find ourselves at some point late at night struggling to make a PowerPoint presentation more fun, and “voila” these numbers will come to the rescue.
At the end of the day, all that matters is that you take these numbers as fact and not for what they really are: random numbers that are much more fun to look at than stupid letters.
OK, enough of that.
Thanks for checking out this week’s Worst of the Week column. And now for some extras:
–New candidate for most bad-ass name in wireless: Max4G.
What does Max4G do? With that name, anything it wants.
But, seriously Max4G is a provider of small cell backhaul services, which is not quite as awesome as saying “Max4G.” I say for now on when someone asks someone at Max4G what they do they just keep repeating “Max4G, Max 4G, Max4G,” and then do some crazy karate move.
–I received a nice e-mail last week with a subject line that caused my processing centers to nearly crash. The e-mail was subject-lined:
240,000 fans can’t be wrong: One Direction fans likely to set UK record for mobile social media
I couldn’t get to the actual body of the e-mail as I immediately realized that indeed 240,000 fans couldn’t be more wrong.
–Maybe cellphones are not so bad after all:
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