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Carbonite Stacks the Deck With 5-Star Reviews
The Narrative Fallacy writes "In the aftermath of disclosures that Belkin employees paid users for good reviews on Amazon, David Pogue reports in the NYTimes that Carbonite has gone one better with 5-star reviews of its online backup services written by its own employees. Pogue recounts how Bruce Goldensteinberg signed up for the backup service, and all went well until his computer crashed and he was unable to restore it from the online backup while Carbonite customer support kept him on hold for over an hour. Frustrated, Goldensteinberg started reading Carbonite reviews on Amazon and a few of them seemed suspicious. 'They were created around the same date — October 31, 2006 — all given 5 stars, and the reviewers all came from around the Boston, MA area, where Carbonite is located,' including a review by Swami Kumaresan that read more like a testimonial. 'It turned out that Swami Kumaresan is the Vice President of Marketing for Carbonite. His review gives no indication that he is employed by the company.' Another review posted by Jonathan F. Freidin extols Carbonite without mentioning Freidin's position as Senior Software Engineer at Carbonite. 'It doesn't matter to me that Carbonite's fraudulent reviews are a couple of years old,' writes Pogue. 'These people are gaming the system, deceiving the public to enrich themselves. They should be deeply ashamed.'"
Why is anyone surprised? This happens all the time. Anonymous reviews on the Internet + unscrupulous company + morally-gray bloggers looking for a bit of easy cash = cheap, positive publicity.
So... yeah, my blog is in my profile and, uh, I'm willing to sell a bit of my soul if any companies reading this are interested...
"I'm sorry sir, but we've had a problem with our online backup service".
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
... only they weren't anonymous. I know this is Slashdot and no one RTFAs, but did you even read the posting?
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Or maybe you're just posting a negative review because you work for the competition? :-)
There really is a person on this planet named "Goldsteinberg"???
Isn't that kind of, like, overdoing things a bit? Like at least one syllable?
I am not trying to stereotype or anything, but seems to me that would be kind of like having XYY chromosomes...
Or maybe you're just posting a negative review because you work for the competition? :-)
Haha, crap! Yes, you figured me out! I work for the "Build your own Damn Ubuntu RAID server, damnit!" company!
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
These guys should really have their assets... frozen.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
They went through the trouble of making fake reviews for their product... and failed because they used their real names... I don't even know what to say to that...
"This post was found to be satisfactory and it was delivered on time in great condition!"
-Vert^H^H^H^HJohny Luser!
"The best way to accelerate a Macintosh is at 9.8m/sec^2" -Marcus Dolengo
Leave them alone but we welcome the added exposure