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.

Comments

Ouch.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

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.

Re:Ouch.

[dgatwood]

No, Pogue and his publication should sue the company for fraud. That would stop crap like this.

No no no no no

[styryx]

"Pogue and we..."

Just no.

Re:No no no no no

[Dun Malg]

It's unconventional ("we and pogue" would be more idiomatic), but I don't think it's ungrammatical; note that this is a subject, not an object (hence "we", not "us"). Am I missing something? It's grammatically correct, but it's very awkward. The grouping of the collective "we" on an equal footing with "Pogue" strains the mental picture of "we". This grouping, intimating a close association, is such that Pogue would naturally be assumed to be part of the "we" in question, so puzzlement ensues when he is not. It's just bad writing. Being an active part of the conversation in question, Pogue should have been included in the collective "we". Alternately, Valleywag could have used a collective pronoun for itself in a subordinate clause to show the separation. Any of the following would have been better:

"We all wish..."
"Both Pogue and we at Valleywag wish..."
"Pogue wishes (as do we at Valleywag) that..."

It also doesn't help that the /. blurb says "Jordan Golson writes" followed by nothing but a quote lifted from the article, which Jordan Golson certainly did not write, followed by some opinion from CmdrTaco. This sets up a situation where the identity of the "we" in question is thoroughly obfuscated. The original line was marginally acceptable, in a casual online writing sort of way, but it thoroughly lost its footing when it achieved four degrees of separation from the original conversation with Mr. Pogue.

Re:No no no no no

[flydpnkrtn]

This is THE most thorough dissection I have ever seen of the grammatical correctness of a /. post.
Ever.

Myself and we at /. are impressed.

Well Done, I say!

[Gazzonyx]

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.

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.

It's about the sales

[Gazzonyx]

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.

Read with caution

[MasterVidBoi]

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.

Re:Read with caution

[DerekLyons]

Precisely. I'm increasingly finding that I cannot rely on internet reviews. Few products are without some problems, and fewer still ship thousands (or tens of thousands) of units without a lemon or two.
 
But on the 'net, it is those few who seem to drive the reputation of a product. (Bloggers are the worst of the lot - they tend to repeat each other and link in a snarled web, thus making the problem(s) appear even more widespread than they actually are.)

Re:Read with caution

[moosesocks]

It's the Apple paradox.

Their machines are built better, and last longer. But whenever they have a problem that affects a small fraction of a percent of their customers, there's suddenly a huge controversy.

Ask any IT manager, and they'll be able to identify a certain series of machines that were extremely prone to failure (motherboards and power supplies being the usual culprits). You NEVER hear about this sort of thing in the PC world, even though it happens all the time. Maybe it's just because Dell and HP have rather diverse product lines, but anyone who's managed large numbers of machines knows that you occasionally get a bad batch. (The trend also usually doesn't become apparent until at least a year in, unless you've got a truly dismal series of machines).

That's not to say that Apple hasn't done this -- many of the original colored iMacs had a tendency to fail after 3 or 4 years, and weren't worth repairing. On the flipside, their more expensive machines tend to keep chugging right on to the end of their lifecycle (which is typically a lot longer than for PCs -- plenty of 450mhz G4s from 1999 are still being used today for everyday tasks. However, you rarely see a Pentium II sitting on someone's desk anymore)

not a "gadget" review

[1u3hr]

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.

Re:not a "gadget" review

[_|()|\|]

Exactly. I actually RTFA (both of Pogue's and both of Valleywag's), and I kept looking for the stinging indictment of Pogue as a reviewer who "writes whatever you tell him to." Advance reviews are bogus because of golden samples and lavish press junkets. They are not bogus because the manufacturer might change the pricing at the last minute.

Re:not a "gadget" review

[Otter]

I completely concur. He quoted prices that were correct when he wrote them and were changed while (or after) the issue was in press. I don't see where he did anything inappropriate at all.

Consumer Reports only reports on buyable stuff

[Animats]

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.

Re:Consumer Reports only reports on buyable stuff

[Animats]

That becomes a problem when you are considering custom installations, bundled products and services of every sort.

Not really. They use secret buyers for that.

Re:Consumer Reports only reports on buyable stuff

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Yes they do. I canceled my subscription long ago when I got sick of their reviews of computers. They actually gave a higher score to a dell machine that had trial software, because it had trial software (crapware). And the buying guide had an incredible amount of grammatical, spelling and just plain strange errors. It repeated the same paragraph several times in a chapter. It only didn't fit in any of the spots. If I know they don't know what they are talkng about in my area of expertise, I can't trust them to tell me about anything I know less about.

Ridiculous

[Procasinator]

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.

Oh really?

[dgun]

David Pogue writes whatever you tell him to

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...

So where's the "email back and forth"?

[skoda]

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.

Re:Early adopters get what they deserve ...

[roguetrick]

Thats why I'm still riding my horse, I knew all these cars would bite you in the ass some day.

Re:He didn't do anything special.

[Jarjarthejedi]

"Umm, dude, by admitting his mistake, he hasn't done anything special"

Actually, in our modern world, that is something special. What you should have done and what is commonly done are rarely equal and so when someone embraces their responsibility and admits to being wrong they should be praised in order that more people realize that truth is what we want, not looking infallible.

The solution

[causality]

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.

Re:The solution

[jimicus]

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,

I started doing this.

Unfortunately, following it religiously would have resulted in having to go back to using abacuses.

Seriously:

Dell: Didn't accept there was a battery problem with their laptops for months.
Sony: Make spare parts deliberately difficult to obtain. (You ever tried buying a genuine Sony battery a few months after one of their laptops gets discontinued?)
Apple: Have had faults with their laptops which they won't even admit exist.
Fujitsu: Had the most almighty QA cockup with their hard drives, refused to even acknowledge there was a problem in the face of overwhelming evidence.
IBM: Sold computer equipment to the Nazis, despite there being significant evidence of what it was being used for. At the time, no other company had the kind of technology IBM did so the rationale "we may as well, if we don't someone else will" did not apply.

Re:The solution

[ScrewMaster]

Anyone operating such a site would be sued out of existence, unless they had phenomenal legal resources at their command. A couple dozen libel suits would take the starch out of any effort ... doesn't much matter if there's any merit to them. Frivolous lawsuits still require money for a defense.

No Cruise For Pogue!

[meehawl]

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.

Consumers can't be fooled about prices

[TechnicolourSquirrel]

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).

Because yours was a hand-picked tech sample

[DingerX]

Most production horses bite you in the ass as a matter of routine.

... my dad was right.

[Dzimas]

...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. ;)

Never Pre-Order.

[rssrss]

"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."

Yes, you're missing something.

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

It's unconventional ("we and pogue" would be more idiomatic), but I don't think it's ungrammatical; note that this is a subject, not an object (hence "we", not "us"). Am I missing something?

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:

1. There will be a preference for the order that places the pronoun second, but plenty of examples of either order.
2. Coordinated object pronouns (like in Pogue and us) will be far more frequent in subjects than coordinated subject pronouns (Pogue and we). This probably means that whatever folk theory you have about when to use subject pronouns and when to use object pronouns is false.
3. Pogue and we, like that, with a subject pronoun, is hypercorrection. It's a construction that exists only because some people, who have fundamental misunderstandings about grammar, formulate rules that are clearly contradicted by the actual usage data, and then bully others into writing according to those rules.