Hardware Review Sites and Vendor Relationships

VL writes "Manufacturers demanding content changes is nothing new in the tech site community. We take a look at this topic, including one very public example that started in the past three weeks."

Comments

Mistakes, damned mistakes and statistics

[sammyo]

Influence will always occur, never take a single opinion as fact. But unless there is a dramatic smoking gun, memo, email, hidden video of the editor at Bill's place on the lake sipping a pina colada (yea, sure), proof will be very hard to come by. Look at a long track record of information, and if you see a lot of ads by one vendor, grain of salt time.

This isn't news.

[Awptimus Prime]

We already read the same exact thing, but in different words and headline over a week ago. This new article brings nothing new to the table except for a slightly misleading headline.

The [H] issue has more to do with halting what someone feels is slander, and little to do with the widespread problems with hardware review sites skewing benchmarks to keep a vendor, advertiser, or to get free stuff.

Unique as the issue may be, it's not worthy of multiple /. headlines until something new actually surfaces in the case.

If I wanted a 15 year old's opinion in essay format on the issue, I would have simply gone to [H]'s forum.**

** - Not that a 15 year old is less intelligent than anyone else, just young people tend to not have their heads glued on straight when it comes to business and law. Wisdom takes time to build.

Nothing new.

[www.sorehands.com]

This is nothing new. The difference is that when a company makes threats such as this, is now it is likely to backfire. Now, some of the people that they threaten on the web are as likely to publicize the threat as to give in to the threat.

In the old days, if you advertise enough the paper would automatically tweek the review. Infoworld had done this with a compiler review. If you read the review, then looked at the score card, you would notice that they did not match.

Excellent

[GuyFawkes]

Finally someone who not only "gets" hardware review sites, but can also sum them up in entirely in 3 very short lines.

Google not a validation of data

[mikewas]

The reviewer said all data came from the manufacturer's public information & Google. Finding it on Google doesn't validate the data. You need to look at the site that Google sends you too, validate that it is a trustworthy site which has information that you can use.

Re:Brilliant! One that works

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah butif we don't click on the ads, they have just burned bandwidth.

And as most of the people reading this far down haven't read the article yet I would like to say something:

Don't click on any adverts.

Re:Google not a validation of data

[TeddyR]

it does not validate the data, but it does validate that the information is "publicly discussed".

If the information covered by NDA can be found using google, then it might be safer to assume that writing about it/commenting might be ok. [though IANAL... so....]