Pogue and the Bogusness of Advanced Gadget Reviews 127
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.
Ouch. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
It's about the sales (Score:5, Interesting)
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Consumer Reports only reports on buyable stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Consumer Reports only reviews products CU can purchase anonymously.
That becomes a problem when you are considering custom installations, bundled products and services of every sort.
Re:Consumer Reports only reports on buyable stuff (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Re:Consumer Reports only reports on buyable stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
Same as it ever was (Score:2)
Bogusness?? It's BOGOSITY! (Score:1)
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If anything, any company that puts out incorrect pricing data on pre-released reviewing materials should be fined and the reviewers should blast them for it and be immune to slander charges. THAT will stop the
Re:Ouch. (Score:5, Interesting)
No, Pogue and his publication should sue the company for fraud. That would stop crap like this.
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why 99% of us are on slashdot?
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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.
This story was for the early adopter.Re: (Score:1)
But there is one counterargument-- a value in letting the public know in advance whether a product's any good.
* If the product is bad, an early review warns people away from it. It takes *time* to do a review--and if it didn't appear until a couple weeks after the product reached retail, a lot of people would buy the product unknowingly. (Who, exac
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No no no no no (Score:4, Informative)
Just no.
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Re:No no no no no (Score:5, Informative)
"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
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Who made you the grammar expert? (Score:1)
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Ever.
Myself and we at
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Are you in a position to be able to tell?
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Hey guy I was JOKING AROUND. Take the attitude elsewhere. This is Slashdot... not everything has to be serious and heatedly debated. Jeez,
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Because I studied it for about 8 years, 5 of which were with some of the most reknowned linguists in the USA?
You mister righto, me no speako goodo englisho. Me henceofortho shutupo mine moutho.
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or the opposite for people who you perhaps don't care to waste your time with.
i'd rather pre-moderate certain people, there is no personal like/dislike involved on my part however of the person, pleasure or displeaure that they should know about. i honestly don't give half a shit how they (or you, or anyone) percieve it, certain people
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Oh, probably just a particularly dumb case of guilt by association--I probably accepted the first AC's misreading of the comment.
Yes, you're missing something. (Score:2, Insightful)
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:
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Why not? Would you prefer "Pogue and us wish the industry standard would change" "Us and Pogue wish the industry would change"? "We and Pogue" would probably be the more common construction, but "Pogue and we" is grammatically correct too.
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Ok, those are acceptable, but is "Pogue and we" violating any grammar rules?
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From the context it is clear that Pogue is not part of the group to which "we" refers. "We" is the valleywag group, Pogue is not part of that group. The structure of the article is something along the lines of "we said X, Pogue replied Y, we countered with Z. In the end, Pogue and we agree that X". Your talk of collectives and hives is interesting and all, but I haven't seen any references to actual grammar problems with the construction "Pogue and we..."
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Please do, because I doubt such a rule exists. Sure, there are collective nouns and plural pronouns, I just don't think that what they did is grammatically incorrect.
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Haha, cute. Ok, point out the british grammar rule that says it's wrong.
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Oh, and what the heck: "formally" != "formerly"; "for all intensive purposes" is not a phrase, and listen up Dan Piraro: Quakers are not "passivists."
(...and Aristotle was not Belgian, the principle of Buddhism is not "every man for himself, and the London Underground is not a political movement...)
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Well Done, I say! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
He didn't do anything special. (Score:1, Insightful)
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
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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.
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There's something fundamentally sick about a society that thinks there's something wrong with pointing out where somebody did something right.
No, there's something fundamentally sick about a society when doing your job inadequately and then admitting it when somebody points it out to everybody is considered praiseworthy.
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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.
The problem with that approach is that, as he wrote in his column, everybody did notice -- he was getting a barrage of emails and other sites had picked up the discrepancies and were starting to take him to task. With that in mind, his column correcting the misinformation was an attempt to save face.
Read with caution (Score:5, Insightful)
And the corollary: It only takes a few anecdotes to tarnish a generally reliable product.
Re:Read with caution (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
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Um, couldn't you search on the product before you buy? I tend to do that with anything costing more than $10 or so. Google (or other search engine) for product name + "complaint" or + "failure" or whatever. You generally turn up some indicators, if there's a widespread problem.
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Re:Read with caution (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
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RAM checking during POST (Score:1)
it sure felt nice/looked cool for a few days though when i had 512 for the first time.
but windows...argh...just the wrong combination at the wrong time.
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Actually, the machines built are of a more controlled nature and Apple has substantially fewer machines in the field than "PCs". Built better and last longer? That's simply conjecture. I know plenty of Apple hardware that has went belly up on the consumer end. And there's more of a controversy because the Reality Distortion Fi
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-- Oscar Wilde.
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not a "gadget" review (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:not a "gadget" review (Score:4, Informative)
Re:not a "gadget" review (Score:4, Informative)
Pogue should have called bullshit on them (Score:1)
i'm disappointed he didn't call them on that. he just lists their obvious 'oh, mistaking web designing!; tomorro
Ridiculous (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh really? (Score:5, Funny)
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...
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I'm not so sure. The WSJ was recently snagged by our boy Rupert Murdoch, owner of FOX news.
So where's the "email back and forth"? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
The solution (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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(note: not sarcasm; intended to be a light-hearted pointing out of the BBB
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Cool... I found someone already maintaining a pretty good alphabetical list. [nasdaq.com]
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If I may be so bold as to make a prediction, I predict that one year from today SCO will no longer be engaging in any deceptive marketing practices or any other abuses. Of any sort. At all. Ever again.
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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 disco
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But there were various machines which simply sorted through punchcards availble, which is exactly what IBM were selling.
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No Cruise For Pogue! (Score:3, Insightful)
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http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fellatrice [wiktionary.org]
fellatrice
English
Noun
fellatrice (plural fellatrices)
(rare) A woman who performs fellatio; a fellatrix.
Consumers can't be fooled about prices (Score:3, Insightful)
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The only realistic solution to this is to allow princinple to be a major influence in our buying decisions. Then, the question of whether you sustain a
My experience with Byte (Score:2)
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They made an editorial decision not to review it, for whatever reason.
They decided that it was still worth mentioning as a new product, i.e. some of their readers might be interested in it. Since you had provided them with the relevant information in your brochure they gave you some free advertising....
I don't see a problem, really.
Worth mentioning != worthwhile to spend a lot of time on a full-fledged review.
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I've developed several pieces of software over the years. If I want a review I do precisely this - write the review myself and send it off. 95% of the time if the journalist uses the piece they will alter the first and last paragraphs slightly and publish the rest verbatim. On the other 5% of cases they will write their own introductory of closing paragraph.
You simply need to work on the basis that your journalist would rather get his copy in quickly and get dow
I need a review! (Score:2)
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... my dad was right. (Score:3, Insightful)
...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. ;)
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I tend to try to get bargains on everything. It doesn't work all the time with everything you want, but it does more often than not. I've only bought one cell phone new (my first one), the other two I've bought used on Ebay for 1/5th of the original price. I think your dads advice applies to any market, not jus
It's 'bogosity', not 'bogusness' (Score:1)
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Not just gadgets, but games as well (Score:2)
Bioware's Mass Effect is another. Award after award for a game that wouldn't ship for another year.
Game magazines suck. They are sleazy, lying whores. IGN, GameSpy, GameSpot -- I mean you.
They're just gossiping (Score:2)
The
Never Pre-Order. (Score:3, Insightful)
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."
It never seems to happen (Score:2)
The magazines (and blogs) just have to start declaring this is their policy. And insisting on it, returning pre-sent merchandise unopened. Telling vendors if they want to encourage a review, this is the only way to do it. (And policing so that only the amount on the
Tinyurl? (Score:2)
At the end of Pogue's retraction/correction article [nytimes.com] he has the following text:
* Last week's Times column can be found at: http://tinyurl.com/3aew5y [tinyurl.com]
Tinyurl? Is this new? Did I miss some major strategic partnership announcement?
Credibility and Content (Score:1)
Most of these writers seem to 'tow the line' and I don't think any change in process is going to make any worthwhile difference.
Irritatingly, Pogue et. al. are constantly pushed by their publishers as 'must read' category, which almost all the time disappoints by lack of product/concept information, poor links (if
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Because yours was a hand-picked tech sample (Score:3, Funny)
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