[kwekly]

There's more at stake than that -- malice or not, a simple, tidy diagram can bypass a human's critical faculties and increase the feeling that the false data (and whatever it's conclusion) are more true. For a statistical research organisation, this is straight up neglect!

Part of my job involves electrical drafting, and though I'm positively anal about my drawings, if I manipulate the design to make the drawing more clear and presentable, it's a snowball's chance I'd ever be excused.

In my case, the risk is starting a fire in a power supply; in theirs, manipulating the market death of a product, however many dollars that might entail. Professionals have higher standards in their field, precisely because we trust them with expert information and give more weight to their decisions. Stupidity is no excuse in this case.

[waterlesscloud]

How much does it matter, though? A pie chart would paint a very different picture, with iOS as a clear minority.

[Tobu]

Here's how this looks like as a pie chart (Nielsen & Comscore data), by the way: http://www.asymco.com/2012/07/13/how-many-lumia/

[mkaltenecker]

How that? Android would be 183°, iOS would be 122°, RIM would be 32°. You could easily see that Android is slightly above 50% – but I’m not really sure how the iOS marketshare would look markedly different.

Since 50% isn’t really a very important threshold (though that could be argued) I would very much argue against using a pie chart. (I prefer areas or lengths to angles.) Plus, a pie chart wouldn’t make it easy to add platform subdivisions.