Nearly thirty years ago I reviewed my first product. It was a Lexmark solid ink inkjet printer, created for designers to do lower-cost but higher quality proofs than were possible on the regular inkjets, expensive colour laser printers, or super-expensive Chromalin machines of the time.
Its launch was also the first press conference I went to. I remember nothing of the event, but I do distinctly remember meeting some of the trade press journalists from the magazines about printing (trade press was VERY large) who promptly took me down the pub. I spent a happy couple of hours getting paid to drink in the middle of the day, and realised I had found my ideal job.
I have no idea how many products I have reviewed over the years, but it’s likely to be several hundred single reviews and even more if you count group tests. All of which makes me think that I know a bit about reviewing.
Unlike Daniel Vassallo:
“First, do no harm” is not a principle that can or should ever be applied to reviews. “First, tell the truth about the product”, on the other hand, is absolute the reviewer’s mantra. You owe nothing to the people who made the product. You owe everything to the people who might consider spending their hard-earned money on it.
Ben Thompson hits the nail squarely on the head:
“Who, though, is to blame, and who benefited? Surely, the responsibility for the Humane AI Pin lies with Humane; the people who benefited from Brownlee’s honesty were his viewers, the only people to whom Brownlee owes anything. To think of this review — or even just the title — as “distasteful” or “unethical” is to view Humane — a recognizable entity, to be sure — as of more worth than the 3.5 million individuals who watched Brownlee’s review.”
Vassallo has taken something of an online beating for this. The idea that telling the people who ultimately pay your wages – those who read your content or watch your videos – the truth about a product is “almost unethical” is indicative not just of Vassallo’s views, but those of the tech executives who have grown up in the last 20 years. The fact that the Humane AI Pin is a lemon is not MKBHD’s fault.
But Vassallo is really just expressing a view that’s part of the present Silicon Valley/venture capital paradigm. Why make a great product when you can make a so-so product and erect moats which turn into monopolies, locking customers in? The Rot Machine is real, and once you buy into it as a business model is not love of great products but a mastery of the mechanisms of stopping people going elsewhere. Customers become users, and who owes users anything? They just use what you supply, and should be grateful for it.
What technology companies hate is that good reviewers have power. And they wield that power not for the company’s investors and shareholders, but for the people who have to work hard and earn money to buy their products. Excellent reviewers can even end up helping improve the products, as Walt Mossberg often did:
“XM is only one of dozens of companies that have redesigned products in response to Mossberg's unsparing criticism. RealNetworks overhauled its RealJukebox player. Intuit revamped TurboTax. Mossberg even forced Microsoft to scrap Smart Tags, which would have hijacked millions of Web sites by inserting unwanted links to advertisers' sites. Few reviewers have held so much power to shape an industry's successes and failures.”
No wonder this generation of tech entrepreneurs would rather that reviewers shut up and gave them four stars.
