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Does Software Need a Siskel and Ebert?
theodp writes "Over at Scripting News, Dave Winer laments the lack of serious software reviews in the NY Times. That wasn't always the case, recalls Dave. 'When they started doing software reviews in the early '80s it was with the usual Times flair,' says Winer. 'But somewhere along the line they stopped taking tech seriously. It's as if they would only review Saturday morning television shows. How could television like The Sopranos or Breaking Bad take root in the culture if there was no criticism that discussed it? Yet that's where we are today with software.' So, does software need a Siskel and Ebert (or A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis for you highfalutin NYT readers!)?"
Most reviews are shills ... companies have whole departments dedicated to getting bloggers to post sham reviews ...
He declared games to be even more creatively bankrupt than movies, and came up with the Boulder Pledge. ("Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message. Nor will I forward chainletters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community.")
The really funny thing to me is that computer games are pretty much the only sector of software with something even approaching a regular review/rating system, and they have long acknowledged that their "Roger Ebert" is either not writing reviews or hasn't been born yet. For other software you have to rely on advertisements disguised as reviews in PCMag et al.
Perhaps Statler and Waldorf...
In the 1980s I did not go to the NYT for software reviews, I went to Byte and other serious magazines for that information.
Time Bomber the Book coming soon.
I knew that the future of reliable reviews at the NYT was over when David Pogue gave MS Word 6.0 for the Mac a good review. It's almost universally seen as one of the worst software upgrades in history.
I emailed him and told him I was disappointed.
I think you're trolling, but as a FOSS advocate myself, I wish you were wrong.
It's much like the problem of racism. After an advocate sees enough incidents of racism, every decision they don't like is suspected of being racial discrimination. Similarly, the myth that "you get what you pay for" is so pervasive that FOSS is often discriminated against, and there's a lot of money aimed at keeping it that way.
FOSS advocates like myself often suspect a bias in bad reviews, partly because we've seen companies like Microsoft pay their shills to bash FOSS, and partly because even honest reviewers don't have any investment in the software they get for free. They'll often dismiss it at the slightest problem when a paid-for product would get a second chance. There's also the familiarity bias, where the latest version of a program will be rated highly because the reviewer's already familiar with older versions, but an alternative has slight differences that the reviewer doesn't understand. While the two packages may be equal to a new user, the reviewer will rate the one they're most familiar with higher. Since FOSS usually has a minority market share, this bias is often against it.
The best way to avoid the rabid hordes of FOSS advocates is to have a professional writing style. Before writing any reviews, show a history of technical knowledge and a willingness to thoroughly examine everything new. In the reviews themselves, explain where and how you got the software (disclosing any conflicts of interest), and preferably also document how much prior experience you have with that program's other versions and competitors. In short, show us that you acknowledge your own faults.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Yeah I hate the new iWork too :)
Part of the problem is that a critic can sit down for two hours watch a movie and write a meaningful review. This is not possible when it comes to software.
Let me use a real life example: I was an early proponent of Java since my first few interactions with it in 1994 were positive. Only when I was is deep in the bowels of the beast did I start to see the problems: flawed parameter passing model, the "everything has to be an object" religion (which ironically is violated by built in data types), the "you must write a preamble bigger than COBOL's to have a well designed piece of code", the horrible graphics library that if first shipped with, etc.
After that I realized that maybe moving to Java is not such a good idea after all. I think the popularity of C#/Haskell/Scala/C++11/Python are a result of this realization.
Instead of Siskel & Ebert maybe we need more of a Mystery Science Theater 3000 for software...