Slashdot Mirror
Truth in Advertising?
PerformanceEng wonders: "I work as an engineer for a large technology company in the U.S., and have been privy to what I find a interesting practice. It's well known that marketing data sheets often paint the best picture of a product while leaving the devil in the details. I've come to expect this, and when I am evaluating technology, I always have a skeptic's eye for claims made by the sales and marketing folks.
However, I've also witnessed our product go into test labs (usually for the purposes of running a series of tests for a 'bake off' in a trade publication). Not uncommon is the attempt to 'tune' the configuration of the device under test to perform in the best light (not unlike tuning your car to pass emissions tests). I have seen it go as far as exploiting weaknesses in the test that, if the test operator discovered, would be considered bad faith. To the other engineers: Are you aware of this kind of practice at your company? To the IT professionals: How much faith do you put in these sorts of publications and their 'bake offs'? To everyone: When does spin doctoring cross the line and become false advertising?"
Consumer Reports is a such a respected publication because they have strict standards for the products they test. They don't accept items from the product makers, they go out into the marketplace and buy their test subjects using cash whenever possible. (Up until a while ago they even bought cars with cash, until they realized that car dealers began recognizing them as the only people who paid cash for cars, and the IRS requirement of reporting large cash transactions got in their way too.) As a result, their tests are immune to any tweaking...
It'd be nice if the tech publications could afford to do this, because at times they start to resemble the video game websites set up by kids who do it only to get prerelease copies of games for free under the guise of reviewing them. Such kids always have to write glowing reviews of everything they get because as soon as they post a negative review their stream of free stuff grinds to a halt.
Bottom line is that there's a foolproof way of preventing tampering in any review, but it costs money. Any review that involves accepting free stuff compromises the integrity from the start.
To everyone: When does spin doctoring cross the line and become false advertising?"
In the consumer audio market, that's when.
From over-unity speakers (200W watts output from a 10W wall-wart), to "better-sounding" fiber optic cable, no claim seems too outrageous or fraudulent for a great many consumer audio manufacturers.
As an engineer who loves audio, it drives me nuts to see the bullshit that is constantly perpetrated in that market.
I'm sure there are tons of slashdotters who can post examples of incredibly unprofessional and possibly fraudulent specmanship in this arena.
Life is too short to proofread.
...for about 5 years in the mid to late 90's. I started doing the testing on basic network equipment and graduated over time to oversee the testing methodology for every product comparison we ran.
I can tell you that, if the testers themselves are competent, it's a moot point. For instance, when testing server hardware by using a database application, I always insisted that the databases be identical and configured as identically as possible. Normal stumbling blocks were issues with stock disk sizes, but we always ensured that RAID configurations were as similar as possible within the realm of reason.
Testing is an art form. It requires a thorough and repeatable plan as well as a good bit of knowledge about real world usage of equipment and software (would it be realistic to enable a non-battery backed write cache on a raid controller in a database application?)
I can say that many, many vendors attempted to put one over on us. And it's entirely possible that I missed some of them, and they benefitted because of it. However, in general, professional test procedures should expose and nullify any sort of vendor tweakage of equipment or software.
Key principles for good testing:
- Set any basic configuration to manufacturer's public recommendations
- Don't let vendor representatives touch anything. If they need to send someone into the lab, allow them to recommend changes, and document all of those for later review / revocation
- If third party hardware/software is involved in a test, use the third party as a sounding board. If you're testing a layer 3 switch using streaming media, talk to the streaming media provider about realistic stream rates and usage patterns.
- If at all possible, wipe and reload vendor equipment and software. You should be looking at the setup process anyway, so that helps the test as well as helping to prevent shenanigans.
In short, good test procedures prevent, or at least mitigate, the kind of abuse in question. And, as consimers of reviews and tests, it's in all of our best interests to get educated and develop opinions about the competence, thoroughness, and honesty of any souce.
Cheers
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
It's funny how that works. HP has somehow managed to go from one of the leading producers of quality printers, for example, to one of the many cheapo vendors.
Remember when a Laserjet 4 was the printer to have?
Or for that matter, remember when Diamond multimendia was the producers of graphics cards?
A company that overstates claims typically is a company that is cutting costs while sliding on their brand name. I wonder how many solid names in the industry have to go down the drain before they realize it's probably not a good idea, in the long run, to overstate the quality or performance of your products.
Heck, I can remember a time when Compaq actually made good computers.
The Internet is generally stupid