Trip Dixon says:
January 7, 2010 at 11:50 am
It all comes down to the audience. I’ve worked with companies that want their dashboards to look like the cockpit of a fighter jet, others that essentially create line item reports within their dashboards. In either case, they loved their dashboards. At least the target audience did, which is the goal.

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Context is everything. Every automobile dashboard has a few gauges similar to your example, and nobody has ever complained to me that this was gimmicky. Factories and power plants still have plenty of dial gauges in use. I wouldn’t use these constantly, but they have their merits. Gauges are familiar, and fairly close to a linear representation. If they are used in a straightforward way, gauges can be very clear graphic representations of data.
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I understand conveying enough meaninful information but sometimes you just need pretty stuff to begin with

They do use up an inordinate amount of area for such small amounts of data. But that is not the major problem.

More important is that they only show one point in time. A line chart can show a complete time series, so you not only know the curent value, but you can see which way it is trending (and a stupid up or down arrow is merely more colorful noise).

For example, your dial that shows 263 dashboards on an apparently arbitrary scale of 0 to 500, would be more interesting as a line chart showing the accumulation of dashboards over time. We could see the drop over Thanksgiving and the larger drop over the eyar-end holidays. We could see how the slowdown over the summer accelerates through the fall. But one single value doesn’t tell me anything besides the one single value, except perhaps that 250 is the cutoff between fair (yellow) and good (green).

I don’t think you can apply that visual merchandising quote to dashboards and gauges. Are we trying to improve sales and profitability? Sure, but we’re not trying to increase sales of the graphic we choose to use. We’re not trying to merchandise the dashboard or its constituent charts. We’re trying to use the graphic to convey enough meaningful information that the managers can make knowledgeable decisions which will improve the sales and profitability of the business.

Calling dials and gauges a valuable or even necessary part of the BI toolset is doing the concept of effective BI a great disservice.