A couple of weeks ago, Sun Microsystems Inc. got caught doing a moderately slippery deed. Sun claimed some of its software was the fastest anywhere, and cited results it obtained by using a third party’s testing program. But the other company cried foul, saying Sun had cooked the books by misusing the testing software.
Fooling these kinds of so-called benchmark tests, in order to produce results that may have little to do with computer users’ real-world experiences, is all too common in the technology business. The uncommon part of this story was that Sun–after first brushing off its critics–actually admitted it had done something wrong.
Sun’s admission was a rare act in an industry that can make politics seem pure. Too often, tech companies spew hype and half-truths. And some uncritical journalists pass it along as fact.
Tech companies are famous for launching announcements, not products, and then shrugging when the products show up late or buggy, or both. The abbreviation RSN has industrywide recognition; it’s short for Real Soon Now–a description of when a company plans to ship a product. All of this is part of that sad, modern maxim which holds that what’s acceptable is what you can get away with.
At the recent Comdex trade show in Las Vegas, everywhere I went I heard an annoying “snick-snick-snick,” the sound of hand-held clickers Iomega Corp. was handing out to attendees. The clickers were part of a giant hype-fest for a product that Iomega, maker of the hugely successful Zip drive, had just announced: a 40-megabyte removable-disk drive about the size of a business card. This drive is just the ticket for digital cameras, portable phones, small computers and other devices, Iomega proclaimed.
Guess what? This device “is expected to be available in the United States during the second half of 1998,” Iomega says in a Q&A on its Web site. If I were a cynic, I’d suspect that this kind of hype has as much to do with buttressing stock prices as helping consumers make better choices. Or, perhaps, it was a reaction to rival disk drive maker SyQuest, which was days away from selling a relatively low-cost, 1,000 megabyte removable drive that may threaten Iomega’s Zip.
Long-range announcements are the norm, not the exception. Intel, for instance, officially announced its next-generation microprocessor earlier this fall, and you won’t be able to buy a computer based on that chip until 1999, if then.
At least Intel made its announcements, combined with a raft of technical details and other information, at the annual Microprocessor Forum, a high-level industry event where top people gather to learn about the nitty-gritty of designing next-generation systems. There’s a difference between this and Iomega’s moves.
The standard for shipping software has slipped, too. Companies don’t even wait for products to be finished before shipping them. They post pre-release versions on their Web sites, and “final” versions can be difficult to distinguish from the pre-release ones. I’m constantly amazed that otherwise rational consumers willingly agree to risk their data and patience by testing such buggy software. Companies say they end up with better shipping products because so many people test software on various system configurations. I’m not convinced that the newer software I run is any less likely to crash or cause trouble than programs I used years ago.
At least we haven’t seen a repeat–so far, anyway–of the disgusting SoftRAM episode from 1995. That product, which claimed to enable a PC’s random access memory (RAM) to hold more programs and data, sold in huge numbers. But credible people looked under the hood and discovered that the product didn’t work as advertised. The entire affair was a scandal, and something like it is almost certain to happen again, because there are few systems in place to prevent it.
Journalists must take some of the blame for all of this. Too frequently, reporters take careful notes–serving as well-paid stenographers–and then pass information along as fact without closely examining it.
I keep thinking that as technology evolves more into the consumer marketplace, the way companies do business is bound to change. But look at the airline business, which has the gall to advertise tantalizingly low one-way air fares and then, in fine print, tell you that the fare is based on a round-trip ticket. The next time you see an ad for shoes, note that the listed price isn’t for one shoe, based on purchasing a pair. The computer industry’s equivalent is the advertisement showing a complete system at a great price, with fine print telling you the monitor is extra.
So let’s offer a small cheer for Sun. Admitting its error was the right thing to do. What a concept.