Product Reviews

What do you do when you’re thinking about buying a new car or appliance or some new gadget? Do you jump in the car and spend hours or days going around to various stores and asking salesmen their “honest” opinion about their products? I can’t remember when I stopped doing that – probably shortly after I was able to get on the internet.

Truth is, a big percentage of people now go online to do their product research. We visit several online retailers like Amazon or Buy.com and see what all the competing products are and read the reviews. The reviews are particularly interesting, especially when they are negative or marginal.

But have you ever wondered who writes these reviews? I get this weekly e-mail from a place called DealUnion that lists all the specials and discounts offered by various online retailers and I noticed a line for a Bissell spotcarpet cleaner, which I have thinking about getting (we have cats and dogs!). So I clicked on it and it took me to Amazon and I read the manufacturer’s info and automatically scrolled down to read the reviews.

Now I’ve seen this thing advertised on TV and I’ve got to say, it doesn’t look like a very good idea to me. It’s a stationary cleaning machine that you just plunk down on the stain and turn it on. Assuming that it works, what you get is a nice clean circle about 6-7” in diameter in your carpet. Now this is fine if the rest of your carpet looks like the day you had it installed – probably not the case huh?

The point here is that all the reviews focused on how well the thing worked, all glowing reviews in this case. But no one suggested that you’d probably be better off buying an upright carpet cleaning machine for a little more money so you can clean a wider area, even a whole room. If you have pets and you need a spot cleaner machine, you’re going to end up with this polka dot carpet in no time, kind of like a big version of Twister built right into your carpet. So you’re going to have to rent or buy a big machine anyway!

So I started thinking about who writes these reviews, wondering if it could possibly be people working for Bissell? Surely these companies don’t recruit employees to scour the internet (from home of course so the company domain doesn’t show up) and submit glowing reviews about their products to improve the product score! My gosh, that would be dishonest and manipulative and, and, totally plausible. Damn.

After I started thinking about that, I got kind of bummed. Here I’ve been thinking that the internet was a place I could go for honest opinions from real people. You know, people who had tried a product and could tell me what it was really like – not the regular marketing hype I get from store salesmen. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t such a skeptic. There is something to be said for the “ignorance is bliss” state of mind.

Letter To The Editor

Letter to Sandy and Dave Waks who publish http://bbhcentral.com/index.html

Hello Sandy and Dave,

I enjoy receiving your newsletter. It is informative but with a personal touch.

Your “adventures” in getting an array of different products to work together is one of my biggest complaints with the current state of consumer electronics. Fact is, the lack of leadership in trying to simplify the whole mess is really quite sad.

It is a shame that the only solution these days to navigating the maze of settings amongst components is to revert to a Harmony remote. I too have one, and had hoped that it would quiet or at least lessen the bitching of my more technically-impaired family members. Unfortunately that dream never came true. Although I think the online programming feature is brilliant, the unit gets out of sync too easily and has several non-intuitive features that confuse someone who isn’t paying very close attention. Most notibly, it just isn’t very well set up to control my DVR.

My point here is not to discuss band-aid solutions like the Harmony, but to highlight the fact that none of these components can talk to each other yet. Why the heck can’t all the consumer electronics marketing geniuses get together in somebody’s suite during CES and agree on a protocol? There is absolutely no technical reason that all components can’t status each other through a data link and give control over to a “media controller” device.

Then your harmony device will actually work because the controller will “know” what status each component is in as opposed to an educated guess. Then when you pick “Play the last episode of Desperate Cowboys while recording Dancing with the Incontinent Gardener and play compilation #59 in the patio, your trusty media brain will poll each unit, turn on what needs to be turned on, choose all the settings, and voila’ everything works.

I know this would require an unprecedented amount of cooperation amongst all the makers of Audio and Video and computer devices. But with the apparent declining interest in “all-in-one” AV boxes, I see no other option. Someone has to wake up and see the growing frustration levels out there. Any day now I expect people to throw open their windows and start yelling “I’m fed up and I can’t take it anymore.”

Regards, John