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Where Do You Go for Worthwhile Product Reviews?
An anonymous reader asks: "What's the deal with reviews and product comparisons? My boss wants independent comparative reviews of proxy and web servers to use to make/justify his decision. We all know that what the vendors write about their own (and competitive) products, so I tried searching for 3rd party reviews. I can find heaps of articles on the web telling us how great IIS is or how good Microsoft's Proxy server is, but nothing showing a back-to-back comparison of Squid vs. Sun Java Proxy vs. Microsoft Proxy, and the same for Apache and IIS. What's happening here? Where can I find an honest back-to-back product comparison?"
I was a student at the time. I was interested in race relations, so what better way to get the 'inside scoop' on the whole deal than to see the KKK in action. Know your enemy, and all that. After the rally I sat down with the Grand Cyclops and asked him point blank, 'Why can't I find any good information regarding the superiority of any given race over any other given race?'
Your question reminded me of that, for some reason.
Everyone's use will be different... For production use, I've rarely found independent reviews that test what I want tested, in the conditions I want, doing the same things I'm looking to do.
For your example case, I'd personally test each product in-house, drawing up conditions and test plans ahead of time. If you're planning a significant deployment, vendors will generally supply product for you to evaluate. Sometimes if you ask nicely, too.
Just my two cents... And yes, I get that it may not be feasible. Its labor and time-intensive. But in-house testing and evaluation almost always beats 3rd party reviews, in my book.
Lie about it, and recommend whichever vendor gives you the most kickbacks.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Choice magazine does unbiased, in-depth reviews, comparisons and evaluations, although from what I've seen so far their software reviews are more consumer oriented.
Search in google the product you want to review then add the following phrase ", problems"
:)
I'm sure you would get all the bad side, then weigh which one of the products are the lesser evil
sample query: iis, problems
There's just too many product types out there to expect any site to track the feedback of, well, the entire market of stuff that's out there. For stuff I've looked for recently, garden equipment and robotic vacuums (ends up there's a bit more than just Roomba out there), I've found specialist forums and even commercial ads to be useful in tracking down details to search further on.
As far as generalist sites - I've found the eclectic community over at Slickdeals.net to be fairly useful in getting a quick grip on what to look for - but forum-goers there are intentionally against bad-mouthing products (thread-crapping), so you have to take a large variety of recommendations there with much due skepticism. Great place for leads though.
Then, of course, there's the Resellerratings-style sites. Once you've scoped product details, it's quite important to get feedback on who you're buying from. Again - due skepticism in all regards will help you in various ways, but large negatives or fake praise for rarely-rated stores can be an important part of an investigation for a large purchase.
If it's not a big purchase though, I'm usually comfortable just hitting Froogle, Amazon, or NewEgg and being done with it.
Ryan Fenton
I've given up searching "$PRODUCT review".
If you're lucky, a magazine will have a comparative review and will have taken roughly equal amounts of ad revenue from each of the competing vendors. Useful search terms include "shootout" and "versus".
Anecdotal evidence from the tech community can be a heuristic if you're wondering about general bugginess and hassle factor. If you need real benchmarks, the only ones that mean a thing are those you run yourself.
Are you running a mixed shop or a single-vendor one? Don't underestimate the pain of interoperability and equipment management hassles if you've never experienced them.
Work as hard as you can to pin down what you need: good scaling on SMP machines? Easy management? Particular features? Good local talent pool for running/fixing it? Low purchase price? Support contracts? The more questions like that you answer, the clearer the choice will be and the easier the web searching will be. "Apache scale SMP OR cluster" is likely to get more informative results than "Apache IIS comparison".
If you are worried about security, then abandon all hope of useful information from the press, concentrate more on lockdown and scheduling updates then on the choice of product (but never install IIS 5), and keep an eye on the news.
Cultivate sysadmins in other places who have environments about your size and with similar needs.
Can't he trust you to decide what fits your needs?
IIS and Apache are _very_ different, for example, and you can't choose between them based on product reviews.
If you go to a related forum you can often post asking about a couple products and often get a reply from someone who used both. Forums can be pretty useful and users can have great expertise. I suspect some manufacturers even let forums do problem solving for them. I got much better advice for a new ASUS mobo from a user in a photography forum then I could get from the ASUS forum. If you go to a forum for webmasters you can get all sorts of advice on servers. I don't trust a lot of published reviews in magazines that take advertising. Recently I was shopping for an LCD monitor and reviews often use wrong specs and don't seem to understand the product very well (they won't even mention if a panel is S-IPS or S-PVA etc). Certain brands seem to get a lot of wiggle room and a look at the ads on the bottom of the page usually shows why. One good site for head-to-head comparisons for monitors is http://www.lesnumeriques.com/duels.php?ty=6&ma1=52 &mo1=149&p1=1606&ma2=36&mo2=105&p2=1041&ph=6 .
I know monitors are not what you asked about but I still think forums are best bet. You may be lucky not many reviews exist because I find its a good way to get hung out to fry.
Seriously. The way I was taught this biz, is don't believe anything anybody tells you. Set the stuff up and evaluate it yourself.
If your associates there have made decisions based upon what they have read, and not what they have experienced, there are probably some really nasty timebombs waiting to go off. Hopefully you'll be far far away by then...
cat
Erm, 750GB drives from Newegg are SOHO equipment. I'm sure, if you as a company asked IBM, HP, or whichever your server supplier is for a evaluation pack of one of their SAN appliances, that would've happened in a rather short space of time.
We usually do that for our regular customers (i work for an IBM BP).
I usually type in "product manufacturer's name" .com and read the opposing arguments. Whichever spouts the most useless, redundant statistics about their product ("This printer has USB AND plug and play support! PLUS it can print 8.5x11 and is composed of protons, neutrons AND electrons!") or the most bullshit ("MADE FOR GAMERS!") obviously is trying to overcompensate for a lack of serious ware.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
I can only wish it was that simple. But other than keeping quitting and moving to fresh small startups (which probably don't exactly pay a lot for an admin), it's not really practicable.
And even as a startup, if your work isn't purely developping your own product, you end up doing stuff for various clients. Which have their own ideas set in stone, based on reading some IT-for-retards ragazine or on a golf round with the nice salesman from MS/IBM/whatever. And we all know that you can't trust those techies with their techno-babble speak, whereas a salesman would never tell a lie
An as soon as the company grows past a certain size, and doubly so for companies whose primary product aren't programs or IT services, well, my favourite metaphor is: clue is heavier than air. The higher you go up the hierarchy pyramid, the thinner it gets. If clue were oxygen, you'd see higher level managers blue in the face like they're Smurfs.
To their defense, it's not their job to know the finer points and differences between web servers, but then it also shouldn't be their job to take such low level decisions. So you have a bunch of people taking decisions about stuff that they knew nothing about, and it wasn't their job to know anything about. What really makes it worse is having several layers of shielding against the effects of bad decisions. He made some "strategic decision" to go all-IIS, and can claim credit for any positive results (even coincidental or immaginary), but it's _your_ fault if something goes wrong with it or it takes too long to port your application to it. And whenever such shielding is in place, out goes the incentive to get any real clue or to refrain from taking bad decisions.
But, to get back on topic, you'll find very few large companies where such shielding from responsibility isn't in place. So you're limiting your employment oportunities drastically if you only accept jobs from the few who aren't led by people who don't take their IT info from ads and salesmen.
Probably a more realistic thing to do is realize that, in the end, few things matter _that_ horribly much. Some people have a penchant for blowing minor differences out of proportion, and make mountains out of molehills. There _are_ product issues that matter, and there _are_ awfully bad management decisions, but there's also a lot of stuff which really isn't as critical as the "either something is perfect or it's complete crap" gang makes it sound. If some proxy is 5% faster than another, pfft, it doesn't even start to matter. You'll want plenty of margin for when you get slashdotted anyway, but 99% of the time it'll be _way_ under-used. Having 5% or even 10% less unused capacity isn't the end of the world.
And once you do a realistic assessment of how bad it really is, a lot of things aren't _that_ horrible after all. So management picked a less than optimal proxy. Who cares? Compared to some other decisions I've seen various managers take, this doesn't even start to matter. If you're going to quit a job solely because of something like that, methinks you need to rethink your standards. And maybe look for an OCPD support group in your area.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I find the best source of information about a product is the manufacturer's website. Or just ask a salesperson in a distributor's showroom. They'd never give me bad advice, would they? You're not going to rely on some random "third party" on the internet, are you?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Some things I learned include...
1. The only job a real programmer will take must involve Ruby on Rails
2. Never buy a MS product
3. Filesharing music is "fair use"
4. Programmers should not create closed source programs EVER.
5. Linux sucks, BSD sucks, MacOS sucks, and Windows sucks. (I am posting from an IBM/360)
6. The only safe browser is Lynx
What's the best car to buy? Although some brands have quality issues that rule them out, ultimately the question "which car is best?" depends on who will be driving it.
I'm a former cabdriver, so I'd be happiest in a Dodge Charger police package; my ex-wife hates big cars, so her Saturn is perfect for her.
Similarly, I'm a Windows geek/MCP. I'm better at installing, configuring and running M$ products, so IIS would be best for an environment I had to design and support.
Others who read this would be far better off (and happier) running *nix, so a non-M$ solution would best meet their needs.
Choose the one you want, then find facts to support your preference... they're out there somewhere.
Clearly, we need people to write reviews of reviews and post them.
Thanks to slashdot, I know that the PS3 is total crap, and that the Wii is the best thing since sliced bread. I also know that Vista is nothing compared to Mac OS X. vi is better than emacs.
perception is reality
RTFM
Before I buy any piece of electical equipment or software, I download the manuals first and then compare these.
Advertisements can juggle around with specs and features and make all sorts of claims which they don't need to keep, or atleast can be interpreted to fit the actual lack of features.
Manuals have much less room for this and will typically expose problems with a product, since manuals have to help the user get around these problems. They're also invaluable in determining whether a product will be user-friendly and whether the features claimed do what you need them for.
There's nothing that beats evaluating it yourself, since even manuals don't mention every single fact you might want to know. For instance, one deciding factor when I bought my TV was the speed by which I could change channels (which can vary a lot!); manuals and reviews typically don't mention this, so I tried out the remotes in the store.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I just found this site yesterday: http://www.hardwareranking.com/ while looking for reviews of Syncmaster 244T
It seems to pull in reviews from many different sources.
In the end it was worth it, however, since the Printronix company never sent us the $12k bill and we got the printer for free. I still wish I had asked PHB right after I ruled out IBM.
For IT-related stuff, it's Google or your favorite industry-specific newsgroups.
For general "gadget" related items, I typically check out The Gadgeteer first, then Google.
For digital cameras, it's Steve's Digicams all the way, then Google.
For cars, it's AutoTrend or Consumer Reports Autos, then Google.
For general household stuff, it's Consumer Reports, then Google.
And in pretty much every case, I check Google.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
I don't know of any general product evaluation sites so I don't think you'll find a standard research approach. In gathing and organizing information from a multitude of diverse sources, I would do the following:
* get a spreadsheet...
* define what you want. This should become a long list of function points.
* evaluate the importance by weighting the important of each function point (eg. 1 to 10)
* get your stakeholders to review and approve your list if they haven't already when providing the importance score
* start looking at potential solutions. For each function point, input a percent of coverage provided by that solution. Footnote your source for future reference.
* group related function points for clarity so you can evaluate a products weaknesses at a higher level
* Scores will be higher for packages providing better function point coverage * start communicating your findings via charts, graphs, etc.
For extra credit, you can correlate your function points with gross margin (i.e., to what extent and to what level of impact a given function point will have on gross margin). Get with the accounting or operations folks.
That's my approach. It's not cool, but I haven't found anything better.
If I'm thinking about purchasing an Acme Widget, I google something like acme widget sucks .
Or if it's a technical product, like the Acme Flux Capacitor, I might google acme flux capacitor teh sux0r .
Because a bad review is worth its weight in gold.
http://www.dpreview.com/
or
http://www.fredmiranda.com/reviews/
Here are some of my tips to avoid products that suck.
1. If the product is available on Amazon.com, check out its reviews. Also note that sometimes slightly different/older versions of the same product have more reviews. It takes some time to sift through the sycophants and astroturf but it's a great source.
2. Search for negatives. Try google searches on "*product* sucks" or "*product* problems" and other permutations to find peoples' complaints about a product or its company.
3. Look for refurbs.... if you see a lot of refurbished versions of your product in the marketplace, this is a bad sign usually.
4. eBay... search completed auctions to see what the going value and interest is in the product. Also eBay auctions tend to have the most comprehensive array of specs on these products, often more informative than the manufacturer's web site.
5. Avoid all the large web sites with the bogus reviews and meaningless content. If you search on "*product* reviews" you're guaranteed to get a bunch of shill web sites that are worthless.
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