From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Thu Apr 13 2000 - 09:07:01 MDT
On Wed, Apr 12, 2000 at 03:59:00AM -0700, Max More wrote:
>
> I'd have to dig out the authors and their book, but at a Cato/Forbes ASAP
> conference, I saw it convincingly demonstrated that Microsoft's success in
> each area of software directly correlated with the comparative quality of
> their products according to computer magazine reviews. (For instance,
> Internet Explorer only really started to catch up with Netscape Navigator
> after a few versions when the reviews changed to say IE was as good as or
> better than Navigator.)
>
Out of curiosity, did the people presenting this study compare
advertising/marcom spend directed at those magazines on a per-vendor
basis? Last figure I heard for Microsoft was a $1Bn annual advertising/-
marcom budget, which is huge by any measure. Yank Microsoft's ads, and
Ziff-Davis quite possibly goes bust, or at least downsizes drastically.
Clue: I write for a computer magazine. We _try_ to stay neutral, but
it's virtually impossible to slam a major customer's products. You just
*don't do it* if you want to keep earning money. And other publishers
are a little less scrupulous ...
-- Charlie
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