Peter Kafka tweets:

“10% of Netflix’ 33mm subs have watched 6 eps of house of cards, and 23% are cord cutters? Both seem too high”

This is based on a TechCrunch article by Ryan Lawler, citing a survey by Cowen and Company, a bank. Lawler writes:

Cowen surveyed 1,200 people last week, of which about 28 percent were paying Netflix subscribers, and another 18 percent had access to a Netflix streaming account. Of those, about 10 percent had watched House of Cards during the first few weeks it was available. And they’re not just watching one episode — on average, Netflix viewers had streamed an average of six episodes of the new original series.

Okay. And:

Approximately 23 percent of Netflix subscribers said they had cancelled their cable or satellite TV service. Those who had cancelled watched about 8.5 hours of content on average.

Well, not 23% of all Netflix subscribers — 23% of the Netflix subscribers surveyed by Cowen and Company, which were 28% of the people they surveyed. That’s 23% of 28% of 1,200. That’s 77 people.

Same goes with the House of Cards stats: It’s not perfectly clear what Lawler is describing, but it seems that it’s based on 10% of the combined 46% of respondents — paying subscribers and people “borrowing” access? That’s 55 people.

I don’t know anything about Cowen’s methodology — I haven’t seen the report — but I’d be a lot more comfortable with a bigger sample size of Netflix subscribers, and a survey pool that extends beyond people who take online surveys. (I’m guessing this was an online survey.)

I haven’t started watching House of Cards yet, though Twitter suggests it’s solid. But as for cord-cutting Netflix subscribers, 23% does seem high — my hunch is that 6 million losses would probably show up more dramatically in cable subscriber reports.

This post was first published at LinkedIn. Please follow me there for more commentary.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk shreds* the New York Times review of his Model S, using data to argue the writer is telling the wrong story.

I won’t pretend to know who’s actually right or wrong here — Tesla certainly only has an interest in telling its side of the story — but the fact that a company has the tools and distribution to quickly publish something like this today is pretty amazing. (See also, OXO’s wonderful takedown of rival Quirky.)

Even a few years ago, something like this probably would have required finding a rival newspaper — the Wall Street Journal, perhaps — to collaborate on a takedown. Or maybe an expensive full-page ad campaign in the top five papers, which would have looked defensive and seemed less convincing.

But now that every smart company has a regularly updated blog, Elon Musk has 136,000 Twitter followers, etc., brands can speak for themselves very powerfully. And if the tone is right, they don’t even look lame: Tesla actually looks pretty great right now*. The balance of power has shifted.

This is one of the reasons that when startup founders ask me how they can get press for their new company, my first piece of advice is for them to start publishing their own.

Obviously, credibility is important, and it’s still a place where long-trusted media companies — especially the New York Times, WSJ, etc. — have an advantage over individual brands. (Though the Times itself has famously run into problems here.)

But many brands have established themselves as credible publishers. And why shouldn’t they be? They almost always know their industries better than the reporters covering them. And in many cases, their executives are actually great writers. (Etsy’s Chad Dickerson, for example.) Some of my favorite things to read today are made by companies that previously had nothing to do with publishing.

*Update: Here’s a good follow-up by Rebecca Greenfield at the Atlantic, arguing that Musk’s data doesn’t back up his claims. And later, a thorough follow-up from the Times. This one is still playing out.

Also: Actually, It’s A Great Time For Magazines

The optical drive in my iMac is getting moody, and there have been a few times when I wished I’d had an external disc drive around to use with my MacBook Air. So I added the $35 AmazonBasics DVD drive to a recent order.

It works! And it’s $40 cheaper than Apple’s $75 USB SuperDrive. The downside: It’s moderately ugly, in an AmazonBasics kind of way. And it comes with a weird dual-headed USB cord that you don’t need with a Mac. But if it’s stashed in a cabinet most of the time, who cares.

The real reason I am writing this review, however, is to relay the strange but delightful experience of loading a DVD into a disc drawer for the first time in years.

I have only used self-loading, slot-based optical drives since about 2007, and rarely, at that. Pressing an actual button to eject a disc drawer, then carefully loading the disc — using that weird, round, crunchy-sounding thing in the middle that holds the disc in, which I haven’t seen since a Discman — felt positively ’90s. (At least it didn’t require a caddy, like my old Apple SCSI CD-ROM drives.)

It took me back to an era when CDs were expensive, precious objects to be treated with absolute care — not cheap plastic things you stacked in a spindle or left out for months, upside-down, on top of the DVD player.

Anyway, then I tucked the drawer in, fired up my app, and took care of business. But for a moment, today — and for the low price of $35 — I felt decades younger. Thank you, Amazon.

Note: Purchases made through these links help support SplatF. Thank you.

Also: Here’s What Apple Propaganda Looked Like 15 Years Ago

In the era of the fast-fail startup, it’s kind of impressive that Slacker Radio even still exists. Especially considering the always-lousy business of streaming music. Especially considering that its name is “Slacker”.

But sure enough, Slacker is still alive, launching yet another new design, trying to wiggle its way into the mainstream between iTunes, Pandora, Spotify, Rdio, etc.

Most of you have no reason to remember this, but Slacker actually launched almost six years ago with its own music-playing gadget, designed to link up via a satellite receiver (sold separately) or wifi, which downloaded a bunch of songs to play (for free) in a radio-stream format. It could also hold a few of your MP3s or Windows Media audio files (heh).

Interesting idea, and I enjoyed the few minutes I had with a prototype during my Forbes days. But even in 2007, this seemed unnecessary.

Easily one of the best-produced video packages I’ve seen online, and better than most of the stuff on TV — on, I assume, a fraction of the budget. Really, really impressive.

Related: ‘Rise Of The Tech Bandits’

AOL reported its fourth quarter 2012 results today, posting its first growth in 8 years (!). Below, an updated version of my decade-of-AOL-dialup chart, a new look at how AOL (sorta) makes money, and one of my favorites, the AOL vs. Netflix decade of moving in opposite directions.

First, the big picture for AOL dialup: Continued, albeit slower decline. At the end of 2012, AOL had 2.8 million subscribers, down almost half a million from 2011. But it only lost about 100,000 subscribers from the end of September, a lower-than-average drop.

AOL also reported how its different business segments contribute to its sales and profits.

The story forever has been that AOL’s dying dialup business directly generates most of its profits and indirectly, its biggest chunk of revenue. Subscriptions themselves are just 29% of AOL’s sales. But the newly reported “Membership Group” — including AIM, AOL Mail, search revenue from AOL subscribers, etc. — generates the biggest chunk of sales and more than all of its profits. (That is, the segment itself is more profitable than AOL as a whole.)

Meanwhile, AOL’s “Brand Group” — AOL.com, HuffPost, Patch, Engadget, TechCrunch, etc.; the future of the company — generates almost as much revenue but almost zero profit.

Summary: AOL still relies too much on its “old” business. But at least it still has it.

Lastly, an updated version of one of my favorites. It’s hard to find two companies that better represent the old and new Internet eras than AOL and Netflix. Both are primarily subscription-based companies, both looking for about $10-20 per month from you. And as you can see, their popularity is almost exactly the opposite of each other.

This makes perfect sense, of course. AOL represents dialup, and Netflix broadband. You’d generally only want one or the other — not both.

A simple, one-off site that Foursquare made for planning Valentine’s Day stuff, which plugs into its powerful Explore service.

The broad, public perception of Foursquare still seems to be that it’s all about being the mayor of some bar, or something useless like that, which actually hasn’t been the company’s focus for a long time.

But it is a little hard for someone who only knows the old Foursquare to grasp how useful the new Foursquare has become. The company has actually made great progress in product, design, and utility over the past year. But like many companies, it hasn’t communicated this sufficiently. That’s a big part of the reason, I’d guess, that it isn’t growing as fast as it could be.

Practical, useful examples, like this one, are smart to produce. More of this.

This post was originally published at LinkedIn. You can follow me there for future long- and short-form updates.

Michael Dell will always have the distinction of being the guy giving a forgotten CES keynote at the same time Steve Jobs was unveiling the first iPhone, so perhaps that makes up a little for that silly thing he said about shutting down Apple that looks even sillier in hindsight. (Lesson: Life is weird! Don’t be a jerk.)

But this isn’t about shaming Mr. Dell, now that he is taking Dell private at a small fraction of its peak value, so he can make big changes and try to save the company. This is about the one time Dell really impressed me, how it ultimately disappointed me, what I’ve learned from that, and maybe a hope for Dell’s future.

It was August 2004 and I had just returned home to Chicago after spending three months living out of a backpack across Europe — from DeGaulle to Dubrovnik, as I liked to say. I had recently graduated from Northwestern and was planning to live at home for a year, save some money, and maybe move to New York and get a media job.

I had a 45-minute commute to work and wanted a computer to play with on the train. My iPod was good at music but it was useless beyond that. Apple had nothing else to offer me; the Mac laptops at the time were unpleasantly heavy. My Sony Ericsson phone was fun for taking grainy photos and checking sports scores over the slow, early mobile web, but it wasn’t powerful enough for much more. Palm seemed to be stuck in a rut, selling boring devices with lame software and weak Internet support.

The only thing on the market that really impressed me was the Dell Axim X30, a lightweight, silver PDA with a full-size color touchscreen, built-in wifi (rare!), an expansion-card slot, and what I had hoped would be a useful Microsoft operating system, which was at least colorful. It was $408.

It was the most excited I had been about a gadget in years, and it was a Dell. As a lifelong Apple/Mac person, this confused me. But it also felt a little fun to step outside my comfort zone. This was, in theory, an iPod touch three years before Apple invented it. Dell was way ahead of the game. The thing even looked pretty cool.

I bought it to read and write email on the train, play a few games, read electronic books, watch movies, and to use the web at home when I wasn’t at my desk. In theory, the Axim and Windows Mobile supported all of those activities.

But in reality, it was a huge let-down. The wifi was weak, the OS was buggy, things crashed all the time, and the pocket version of Outlook was useless. Locating and installing apps was hard work. Movies weren’t smooth. Trying to sync the thing to a Mac was basically impossible.

For all the foresight Dell had to get into pocket computing years ahead of the pack, it lost everything in poor execution. The hardware was mostly nice, but the software was horrible, and the ecosystem was non-existent. I sold my Axim on eBay in late 2006 for $200, after I’d picked up a Palm Treo, which at least, sort-of, sometimes worked.

My lesson from the experience: A gadget’s software and ecosystem matter ten times more than its hardware. Apple gets frequent praise for its hardware design, deservedly! But what really made the iPhone unique and amazing — and the iPod before it — was its software. It was simple, elegant, and it almost always did what it promised: The exact opposite of my Dell Axim + Windows Mobile experience. This is a lesson I applied not only in my future gadget purchases, but also in my career .

It’s easy and appealing to poke Apple for things like the iOS Maps screwup, but by and large, it has led the world in handheld software (and ecosystem) for a decade. Meanwhile, whatever Dell gained by being years ahead of the handheld computer trend, it lost by relying on Microsoft, which is still way behind. This continues to hobble Dell today. (Its attempts to make Android devices haven’t been much more successful.)

I have no idea what Michael Dell is going to try to make Dell in 2013. Perhaps it will be an enterprise software company, or a consulting services company, or a tablet company, or something entirely different.

But my hope — for Dell’s sake — is that if it ever finds itself in an interesting place again, it understands the need to get the whole story right. For instance, if it’s ever years ahead of the market with a hardware product again, it better have the software ecosystem to go along with it.

This is going to be really hard — especially as Dell is seeking Microsoft’s help to go private — and it may already be too late. But still today, I’m a little sad about what might have been with that cool little Axim.

“Imagine a free WiFi network spanning the country. The feds want it to happen, wireless cos don’t.” That’s NYT media reporter Brian Stelter’s tweet this morning, linking to a Washington Post article by Cecilia Kang.

Sounds amazing! Probably too amazing.

The article itself has a dreamy beginning, too:

The federal government wants to create super WiFi networks across the nation, so powerful and broad in reach that consumers could use them to make calls or surf the Internet without paying a cellphone bill every month.

A few important questions:

• Why would the Internet access be free? Sure, the airwaves that would be used for this service wouldn’t come with the multi-billion-dollar FCC auction price tags that, say, Verizon and AT&T have paid for the right to sell you cellphone service. But someone still has to provide the bandwidth, and last I checked, bandwidth isn’t free. And the companies that are in the position to most easily provide the bandwidth for this service are the cable and phone companies — the same ones that are theoretically most at risk from a service like this one. And once you start there, someone has to pay for the network infrastructure, the bandwidth management, the CRM software, the billing, the credit card processing, etc. I still have never seen anyone explain how these airwaves would actually turn into free Internet service.
• Why would this be better than the inexpensive Internet service we already subscribe to? The WaPo’s Kang even warns, “with no one actively managing them, connections could easily become jammed in major cities.” Well, that sounds great! “Free” crappy Internet. Last I checked, most people would rather pay more than they do already for good, fast, reliable Internet access. Slow, unreliable access is already a pretty frequent complaint. Life is too short for shitty wifi, even if it’s free.
• Would this even work with the devices you and I carry around all day? No guarantee that Apple or Samsung would support these networks. Don’t forget who actually writes the checks for Apple’s billions of U.S. iPhone profits: AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint.
• Why is this in the news again, anyway? This has been vaporware for years. It seems more like a publicity push for the FCC and/or Julius Genachowski than anything tangible. See Google talking about it here in 2008, problems with devices later in 2008, more “Imagine a future…” salivating in 2010 by MG Siegler, etc.

Perhaps this is another head-fake attempt to get the existing broadband companies to build better, faster services for their subscribers? Who knows. But it certainly still doesn’t pass the smell test.

I’d love for this to actually be a believable reality, and for it to be awesome. But right now, it’s science fiction.

Apple has been sharing some details of its success in China for a while. But last week, Apple formally created a Greater China segment in its quarterly earnings materials — it previously reported only a broader Asia Pacific segment — and released two years of historical data. (“Greater China” also includes Taiwan and Hong Kong.)

The upshot: China is easily Apple’s fastest-growing market, with December-quarter sales up 67% year-over-year, compared to Apple’s 18% overall growth and 15% growth in the Americas. This is why I always think of China when topics like “cheaper new iPhone model!” come up.

China generated $6.8 billion of revenue for Apple last quarter, not including Apple retail stores, which are a separately reported category. (On Apple’s earnings call, CEO Tim Cook noted that China including retail was $7.3 billion, but Apple has only reported that data sporadically.) That’s about 13% of Apple’s overall sales, or ~14% if you include retail. But China represented 34% of Apple’s year-over-year December-quarter revenue growth, while the much-bigger Americas market represented 32%.

It wasn’t always this way. A few years ago, China didn’t deserve its own line on Apple’s reports. Now it clearly does.

One note: While this past quarter was Apple’s biggest ever overall, sales-wise, it wasn’t the biggest China quarter. Apple’s Greater China business generated a peak $7.6 billion during the March 2012 quarter, when the iPhone 4S launched in mainland China. ($7.9 billion including retail.) China represented 19% of Apple’s overall sales that quarter.

When might China pass the U.S. in sales for Apple? At Asymco, Horace Dediu predicted that it could happen by 2016. He also notes a surprising fact: Apple’s “China sales grew in three years as much as they did in the US in 33.”

Also: Apple’s Semi-Soft Quarter In Charts