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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
...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. ;)
"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.
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?