Alienware Admit Trying to Fiddle Reviews

An anonymous reader writes "Alienware seem to have admitted threatening review sites with no future hardware unless positive reviews are written about their products. Hexus.net attempted to obtain a recent Alienware system and were rebuffed in an email claiming that their last review had scuppered the chances of them getting any hardware to review in the future. Follow-up emails confirmed this was part of Alienware's global marketing strategy. " I've read through the whole article and it would appear that the above is what the rep said. Now, granted, one would hope that's one person in that company, but still bad form.

Standard Marketing Practice, Nothing New Here

[Old VMS Junkie]

I wrote for a couple of computer industry trade rags back in the early 90s and the editorial policy was that we never gave bad reviews. If a product sucked, the review was never published. We gave feedback back to the manufacturer but nothing got printed.

The reasoning was simple. If the manufacturer really wanted a review printed, they would fix their product (and some of them REALLY wanted good reviews and actually did make improvements). And if the magazine wanted to continue to get advertising dollars, they didn't print bad reviews. It was the unspoken quid pro quo.

Re:Question

[ip_freely_2000]

It depends on what is being reviewed. For most system makers, no.

There are a number of systems built by the maker for review purposes..they are configured and then shipped out for review. The reviewer has a number of days to do their work and then the system is shipped back. The system maker will clean up, check and reconfigure the system then send it out to the next reviewer.

Re:Surprising?

[ePhil_One]

And do you think most companies give out free hardware to get "C" grade reviews?

Which is why Consumer Reports has always bought their own hardware. Review sites get customized, tweaked hardware, versions not sold in stores, and are effectively on the the dole by accepting both advertisements and "review" hardware from advertisers. The only thing thats surprising here is the the Marketing Drone actually let the review know the reality, not done for precisely this reason. Obviously this reviewer is new to the scene, in that he's at all surprised by this.

One of the car rags touched on this years ago, they described it as "damning with faint praise", when you get a bad product in you still give a positive review, but throw in lots of qualifiers. "Quality is what you expect at this price point", "Ample ashtrays are provided", etc.

They have always had over-priced, flashy cases with mediocre hardware.

And what is your gripe? Are you the reviewer? Overpriced, perhaps, but you are flat out lying with the statement "mediocre hardware". Premium hardware at premium prices is far more accurate, the one thing I don't recall them ever doing is skimping on the $5,000 desktops.

Shocked.... file under not news category

[klubar]

Is anyone surprised by this?

Apple has been doing this for years.... sites or publications that don't give glowing reviews are not invited to press conferences, don't get the cool swag, are excluded from preview announcements, don't get access to excutives. It's one way that Apple manipulates (influences) the press... that's why sites that always give great reviews (see Wall St. Journal) always have easy access to the newest equipment and executives.

Review sites are rampant with fradulent reviews on both sides. Manufacturers are giving hardware in exchange for favorable reviews and meanwhile many of the review sites are just shills for hardware vendors. It's always been somewhat true that the advertising side of publications had some influence over the editorial side, it's just gotten much worse (and easier to cheat

Re:No news here

[lucabrasi999]

I started dismissing Consumer Reports when I read that they rated eMachines the best computers. Not best value, or some other quantifier. Hands down best.

I've been a subscriber for four years. I don't recall ever seeing them rate eMachines highly. In the most recent issue, they rate a Compaq Presario highly for Budget Models (512MB RAM, 160GB Hard Drive). For workhorse models (1GB RAM, 250GB Hard Drive), they rate a Gateway highly. But, for both Compaq and Gateway, they point out that support and reliability are below par. You should note that being rated HIGHLY, does not necessarily mean CR recommends a particular item.

In general, CR recommends Apple. In their benchmarking system, Apple doesn't usually rate highly. There are almost always Windows machines that perform better than a particular Apple product (at least in CR's testing). But, when it comes to reliability, support and the general lack of Virus issues, CR prefers Apple.

HardOCP too

[homer_ca]

HardOCP buys their review systems through retail channels and tests their tech support while posing as a regular customer. They're one of the few hardware sites that reviews the "consumer experience" instead of just the hardware.

Re:missing S in headline.

[clickclickdrone]

In Britain companies can be plural or singular depending on context. You would use singular when the company is acting as one e.g. 'Zob corporation is in agreement with the ruling' but plural when the corporate entity is not acting as one e.g. 'Zob Corporation are internally in disagreement about the best way forward'. See the Economist style guide here.
http://www.economist.com/research/styleGuide/index .cfm?page=805687 [economist.com]

Re:Surprising?

[qa'lth]

Actually (I used to do this), you have to sent the hardware back when you're done with it. Or, you're usually given the option of purchasing it outright at reduced prices.

One doesn't really accumulate much, overall.

Typical Dell.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm posting this AC as it would not be in my best interest to have what I'm going to say come back to haunt me.

This type of strong-arming is a typical Dell business strategy; in face I'll go so far as to say it is the ONLY business strategy I've seen Dell use.

As an employee of a Dell channel reseller (I'm not exposing either the channel or the reseller) my experience is that you do business with Dell, or you don't do business with Dell. That's to say you play by their rules, sign a contract, then you are at the mercy of Dell. Dell will determine whether or not they will make it worth your while to sell their products; often this means you're actually paying Dell for the (dis)pleasure of selling their products.

Apple is no better. Apple is actually worse in the sense that they have contractual quotas which require a reseller to sell a certain dollar amount of their products in a given time period or lose reseller status; which is ridiculous since there's almost no demands for their products outside of the Home, Home Office, and Education markets.

I think that the smart consumer is the one that ignores industry rags and websites and talks to knowledgeable friends. Don't have a techie friend? Ask a tech at a local repair shop; hell, you might even end up getting a better than OEM system at a great price, not to mention you're supporting local business.

All of the large OEMs, regardless of niche and channel, manipulate how the public perceives their product. Bad press can be even worse than recalls or manufacturer defects with regard to repeat business. In this case, Dell can suck it.

Eventually, regardless of bad press, if your customers aren't satisfied with your products, you've either got to change your business model to meet their needs, or you go out of business. Dell's at a tipping point for a variety of reasons. I have a few simple suggestions for Dell that will turn it back into a reputable company: Don't intimidate your resellers & the press, stndardize your product lines and work with suppliers to ensure consistency across your product lines, DO NOT OUTSOURCE YOUR TECHNICAL SUPPORT AND CUSTOMER SERVICE, and remember you're not in a high margin business; creating artificial sales goals which are unrelated to market conditions and trends is not wise.

In closing, support your local computer shop if you need a powerful workstation. The only people who should be dealing with the giant OEMs are people who don't know any better!

Re:Surprising?

[Anonymous Coward]

You wrote "the one thing I don't recall them ever doing is skimping on the $5,000 desktops"

    They did with me. I bought an Alienware workstation for $5,000 and it was extremely unstable. They shipped it with a video card that Nvidia listed as not being supported for Win XP x64. Once I figured that out and swapped it with something that was supported, it went from crashing every few hours to a couple times a week. But after blowing 80 hours of my time trying to fix the system (which they refused to come out and fix despite me having paid for on-site service), I returned it and got hit with a $500 restocking fee.

    If you google Alienware, you will find numerous horror stories about machines that flake out and the technical support is horrid.

Re:Try Falcon

[Anonymous Coward]

I would've suggested investing in an Apple Mac Pro, rather than an over-priced Wintel PC:

Mac Pro with two (2) 3.0 GHz Xeon Dual Core 2 CPUs
16 GB of RAM
(4) SATA HDDs (I think over 2 TB total)
1 to 4 PCIe graphics cards (take your pic)
up to eight (8) 30" display (hey, she said money was no object)
a FibreChannel card to connect to an Xserve RAID (for thos really big .jpgs, I guess)

GUARANTEED she would be much happier with that (and running Mathematica), rather than spending all of that money and STILL having to deal with multiple drivers, Service Packs, spyware, AV software digging into the registry, and God-knows-whatever-else would bury itself into a Windows OS.

Oh, unless she wanted to install Windows on the Mac, which she can do...