[jacquesm]

> It would be extremely convenient if there were still one number or index we could check to make sense of our economy, especially during times of chaos.

The per-capita debt would be a good start.

Funny to see Apple named as Microsofts successor. I think they're roughly equal in terms of 'launch date', of course the context is successor in the Dow but if you just put the most successful companies in the index (which they do...) then that already causes it to lose a lot of its meaning because any structural 'bad news' will get filtered out.

The idea is to provide a sliding window over history to capture trends, such as to embody the trend of moving away from the Desktop to mobile devices (Microsoft -> Apple) but that's a very imperfect science because a lot of that trend will never materialize simply because a whole pile of stuff (creation, mostly) does not happen on mobile devices but on good old desktops.

Mobile devices tend to be much better at consumption than creation (which is entirely consistent with the trends in computing as a whole).

[amelius]

> Mobile devices tend to be much better at consumption than creation

Except when it comes to shooting videos.

[jacquesm]

That's more of a case of 'convergence' (handycam + phone + still picture camera) than one of transition, but yes, mobile devices have traditionally been much better at creating video and pictorial content because they can move to the scene rather than to have the scene move to them, but this has been true since the 'camera obscura' (literally: dark room) has gone out of fashion.

[moomin]

Good point, but that's mostly raw data capture. Sooner or later you'll want to sit down and edit it. Equally, they make great dictaphones, but you're not going to record a band with it.