Slashdot Mirror
Pogue and the Bogusness of Advanced Gadget Reviews
Jordan Golson writes "New York Times gadget reviewer David Pogue got into an email back-and-forth with Valleywag after he was tricked into writing an article by advance misinformation on a pre-launch product. In theory, it's good for reviewers to test and write up products before release day, so consumers can make informed choices. In practice, Pogue and we wish the industry standard would change." Personally I think this is why blogs are great- if a product sells 100,000 units, it only takes a few dozen bloggers to encounter problems for the truth to come out. Of course, that doesn't help you if you want to pre-order.
That's looking on the bright side. When everything gets spammed by 11y olds telling about how they learned to multiply by 7 today blogs go down
Isn't the best solution to not write about it until it can at least be tested? Why does Pogue, or for that matter, any reviewer, have to beat the release date so badly on such an obscure product? So nobody knows about a product when it's actually released, that's not such a bad thing for everyone, except maybe for the company in question if they have predatory intent.
I think it's important to wait and not rush. I'm happy to let the early adopters try stuff out first for a few months.
"Pogue and we..."
Just no.
He could have also put his hands in his pockets and whistled while rocking back and forth, and hoped no one noticed or said anything. It's rare to see journalists point out when they're wrong (I'm glaring at you, Dvorak!), without being at knife point.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
It would be ideal for them to wait, but that won't sell any magazines if their competitors are covering tech. before it comes out. Especially tech. heavy magazines expected to be on the bleeding edge.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
if a product sells 100,000 units, it only takes a few dozen bloggers to encounter problems for the truth to come out
And the corollary: It only takes a few anecdotes to tarnish a generally reliable product.
if a product sells 100,000 units, it only takes a few dozen bloggers to encounter problems for the truth to come out
And the corollary: It only takes a few anecdotes to tarnish a generally reliable product.
... as does anyone who blindly believes anything they read. Personally, my advice is to wait as long as possible before buying anything. Almost everything I've ever rushed out to buy, in the end turned out to be either overpriced or overhyped. In truth, I'd be wealthy and have more room if it wasn't for all the lame crap I've bought over the years.
The "gadget" is an IP-phone. The technical details are not novel. What was was the prices given. That's something that the company can change at any time. It's not like he was given a styrofoam mockup and gushed about its high quality, he cited prices given a week in advance of the launch. As he says, why on earth would they lie about that? It just makes them look sleazy and/or incompetent. So they suckered Pogue, but shot themselves in the foot.
Consumer Reports only reports on products they can buy at retail. They barely even talk to manufacturers. And not only do they make money, they're one of the very few magazines on the web people actually pay for.
He asked a company for it's pricing and he was supplied with the wrong pricing. For what reason would the prices be wrong? A complete non-story, Pogue did nothing wrong. Releasing prices to the general public is a good thing, not something that should be discouraged. People want to know the price of products like PS3, iPhone and charges of using features of it before they are released, even if only a guideline.
I'll keep that in mind. The next time I piss my wife off, I'll have him write an apology.
You can't top an apology written in the NYT. Unless I can get some putz at the Wall Street Journal...
FAQs are evil.
I think it was awfully big of Pogue to openly admit the prices were wrong (despite it not being his fault that the company essentially lied to him), and address the issue, rather than submitting a correction that would get filed on the back page.
Umm, dude, by admitting his mistake, he hasn't done anything special. He's just done what he should have done. So I don't see the need for praise.
Just because many of his journalist colleagues fail to admit their misreporting, it doesn't mean that he's special. What it means is that he's doing his job somewhat properly, while the others are failing miserably. He's didn't do anything extraordinary. The standards are just so low that by admitting his mistake, he appears better than virtually all other journalists.
Pogue wrote an article with bogus info, then printed a retraction. ValleyWag wrote that Pogue got duped. And then ValleyWag wrote a searing article noting -- get this -- high level electronics reviewers have better access to help and hardware than the rest of us! Who knew? And sometimes their review hardware is cherry picked for advance features! Investigative journalism at its best.
I can only assume the real interesting meat is in the unseen "back and forth" emails. Pity we can't read those. We might learn something interesting.
ShoutingMan.com
nothing to see here
to this is to maintain a "shitlist" of companies that have been known to use deceptive marketing practices, or other abuses such as Sony's rootkit, and make this list easily accessible (a well-known Web site) to anyone who is making a purchasing decision. At the very least, it could make the difference between a pre-order of an unreleased product versus waiting a couple of months to let someone else be the guinea pig -- that shiny new object isn't so shiny anymore if you know it might be a lemon. The idea isn't necessarily that you would never want to do business with a company on the list (although that's certainly possible), just that you would know that you were taking a risk and would take measures to minimize it, i.e. by not pre-ordering a product that has yet to be released or otherwise trusting the word of that company to be correct.
This list should have a reasonable minimum amount of time before any company can be removed (no matter how quickly they improve) and would of course require that the deception/abuse be thoroughly documented, preferably from multiple sources (the standard for this should be high to avoid having the list abused).
Just as government is supposed to fear its people and not the other way around, I believe that companies should fear losing customers instead of customers being in fear of getting a bad deal.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Maybe the reason Pogue was so quick to retract is that he was unlikely to get any paid cruises or book deals from a 3rd-tier discount telephone operator. Unlike the moolah stemming from, for instance, a fellatrice-like relationship with Apple. Mossberg or Levy wouldn't have made that mistake - they're old enough to work the Apple line almost exclusively.
Da Blog
After all, they are the ones who have to buy the thing. Therefore, ultimately, this particular incident is a complete non-issue. Dishonest advance information can possibly fool somebody into buying something that doesn't do what they think it does, but it can't fool anybody into paying a fake price, because guess who's signing the cheque? So, although people could be misled for a little while, ultimately nobody will ever be hurt by incident like this one (though it may reveal a larger communication problem).
Most production horses bite you in the ass as a matter of routine.
Back in the late 80's my father and I wrote a BASIC interpreter for the PC, and we sent off a review copy to Byte magazine along with a brochure. It appeared in their "What's New International" column, the text was lifted straight out of our brochure.
I wish I had read a review before I purchased my Apple Airport Extreme router. This is the most problematic, bug-ridden router I've used - and I've used a ton of routers. The software is so bad, that Apple pulled older firmware so people couldn't downgrade.
...it pays to wait. The technology industry is built around a culture of false urgency, and reviewers like Pogue - along with gadget-a-second blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo - just fuel the fire. It takes days or weeks to discover a new gadgets true strengths and weaknesses, and all that gets glossed over in the quest to be the first to write something meaningful.
It's been going on for decades, though - I can vividly remember kids in the early 1980s bringing super-slim Sony Walkmans to school. They were several hundreds of dollars a pop. My dad simply put his foot down and uttered words of infinite wisdom: "Just wait a year." So I did. In the end, I purchased an Aiwa clone for a fraction of the cost... and my dad's eyes sparkled. His voice still echoes in the back of my head every time I wander lustfully through Best Buy, deftly avoiding the enormous plasma TVs and zillion dollar smartphones: 99% of the stuff we lust after is unnecessary. Don't let Pogue, Mossberg, Lam or The Great Steve try to tell you otherwise. ;)
EOM
eleven plus two / twelve plus one
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is just one example. "Best of E3 - 2006" "Best Online Multiplayer - 2006" Release date: October 2007. WTF? How do you get "Best Online Multiplayer" almost a full YEAR before you release?
Bioware's Mass Effect is another. Award after award for a game that wouldn't ship for another year.
Game magazines suck. They are sleazy, lying whores. IGN, GameSpy, GameSpot -- I mean you.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
"A reporter isn't a superhuman essayist researcher, they are your surrogate, your proxy. When there is a fire on your street at two in the morning, and you can't be bothered to go out in the rain, a reporter goes along in your place, and tells you what's going on, but he only does what you'd do: gossips with the neighbours; gets a word or two from whichever member of the emergency services happens to be walking past; and passes that on." ... from an interesting article at http://www.badscience.net/?p=550
These review guys are just journalists who claim to write reviews but are really just gossiping and passing on information they've been fed by manufacturers. They do the same with politics and science and anything else really - most of them should be ignored.
There was an interesting article about Mossman in the New Yorker a few months back - and indeed the manufacturers faun all over him like flies on s*** - he's got nothing to say except to dullard PHBs and neither has Pogue (whose podcasts are whiney c*** also).
"Of course, that doesn't help you if you want to pre-order."
Never pre-order.
Don't buy a pig in a poke.
Remember the old computer industry maxim: "Pioneers get arrows in their backs; Settlers reap the harvests."
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
But an obvious answer is for the companies to write letters to the sort of press whom they want reviews in, and say, "Go buy our product anywhere. Save the receipt and submit it to us. We'll reimburse you no matter what your review says."
The magazines (and blogs) just have to start declaring this is their policy. And insisting on it, returning pre-sent merchandise unopened. Telling vendors if they want to encourage a review, this is the only way to do it. (And policing so that only the amount on the bill is refunded.)
This would be a great boon to consumer reports, of course, which could now get products for free and still be independent. They would need to continue to choose what they review without regard to this, of course, paying for the ones that don't do the refund, but I am sure that the companies that would refund Road and Track (if it refunded like this) would do it for CR.
Now of course this does not allow review before release. So the right system is to take a look at pre-release products, but also buy one after release and get a refund, to compare the quality. And this is a bit harder, going out and shopping and filing paperwork is more work than just getting a shiny new box by fedex. But it's a lot better.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Who tagged this story "dontpreorderthenyouearlyadopterponce"? Does the fact that it showed up mean many people did?
The best part:
At the end of Pogue's retraction/correction article he has the following text:
* Last week's Times column can be found at: http://tinyurl.com/3aew5y
Tinyurl? Is this new? Did I miss some major strategic partnership announcement?
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
Why, because they're different discourse referents, which have been introduced into the text separately; but more importantly, because the text opposes Pogue to us (where "us" is the author of the text and the readers it is addressed to). That's the whole point of the piece--the claim that there is a conflict between Pogue's interests and ours.
Are you adequate?
Yes, you're missing something. You're not testing your hypothesis against data from actual usage.
Neither have I, but I'm going to guess:
Are you adequate?
It's all a matter of credibility. Some of these writers (including Mr D. Pogue), write for the masses who are regularly duped with misinformation or unwarranted bias towards one product or another.
Most of these writers seem to 'tow the line' and I don't think any change in process is going to make any worthwhile difference.
Irritatingly, Pogue et. al. are constantly pushed by their publishers as 'must read' category, which almost all the time disappoints by lack of product/concept information, poor links (if any) and no follow-up.
Although I love reading about IT (and other things that matter), I've created a sub-conscious ignore list based of '10 strikes and you're out' methodology.
They've lost their credibility and objectivity for my liking.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Check out the website. The real problem here might be that this is one of those outfits where five or six guys sit around and confer long executive titles on each other, and save money on web design by having their nephew download a template. The rates widget that was giving them so much trouble looks like a school project, and the solution was apparently to declare the rates between script tags in the body of the page.
it sure felt nice/looked cool for a few days though when i had 512 for the first time.
but windows...argh...just the wrong combination at the wrong time.
- I'd prefer not to.
i'm disappointed he didn't call them on that. he just lists their obvious 'oh, mistaking web designing!; tomorrow it fixed!' bullshit excuses, as if they are legitimate.
and no, i don't think it should be left to the reader to 'read between the lines'. he sould have called into question their integrity in light of this, inasmuch as he could honestly and without libel concerns.
- I'd prefer not to.
The "best" car is the one with the most cupholders. Apparently, that's CR's metric--count cupholders, and the car with the most is a CR Best Buy. The "best" computer is the one that comes with massive amounts of trial-ware. That's another CR metric--count the number of useless trial applications installed, whichever PC includes the most, that's your winner. Articles are full of "we especially liked...(useless feature x)" On almost every front, CR weights the most obscure and unimportant features heavily, while ignoring what really matters.
The only useful thing in CR are the quality numbers, but even those are biased because they're reported by the self-selected group of "CR subscribers who care enough to respond to CR's poll."
Like any other for-profit journalistic endeavor, CR is bound to know less about any specific subject than a moderately knowledgeable layman. Basically, the more you know, the less they know.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Best. Tag. Ever.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Okay, it seems that it is another difference between the English and USA languages, and is not a rule but common usage. English speakers perceive the aforementioned usage as horrible. USA speakers seem indifferent. YMMV. I apologise for my mistake and misinformation.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...