Thursday 10 September 2009

Marketing bleating

In Dutch we have a saying: "tested as the best". It's introduced by the Dutch Consumer Foundation for those products that are found to be the best amongst others in a test. However, litterly the Dutch saying means that they tested it as the best, better then other product-testing-bureau's. I do believe they can test as the best. But it does not say anything about the results. You can test a product as the best, but still the product can be terrible. So I can do any test on my application I can think of. That could make me the best program-tester around. But still my application can fail a significant amount of test-cases and thus be a terrible product.

Today I got an unrequested marketing mail (that would fit the term Spam right?), that stated that a certain well-known producer of Security Applications "launches as the first malware vendor their newst product: XXX ", being a protection product for Virtual Machines.

Now, that starts me thinking. Am I going to buy Virus or Spam prevention-software from a vendor that calls itself a "malware vendor"? Or is this company eating from two walls? Feeding it's own mouth? It even let me query wiki, to be certain that I understand it right: "mallware is a 'collection-name' of software that is destructive or 'bad-willing' and is a contraction of the English words mallicious software" (free translated from the Dutch wiki-definition).
So apparently there was another marketing-person not thinking correctly about this communique.

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