Reviewers are the problem

Recently there was this headline on the site "Make Use Of" that exemplified why reviewers are probably the most significant part of the decline of technical gear (including software).

Reviewers are apparently so specialised on reviewing things more than using things that they are bored with offerings quickly and want some new thing to come along and dazzle them (NB allow them to dribble more about stuff). The truth is this simply muddies the waters rather than making better use of things.

This article (especially its title) clarifies that the author goes to their computer for some wizz bang experience and not to actually do work.

In contrast I use my computers desktop to access applications and the file system, I couldn't give a rats arse about animations and slick roll ins. I'm there to make use of my computer to do things:

• development (you know, making software)
• editors (video, image and text)
• communications (email, and other services)
• entertainment (playing music and watching video)

I don't want a desktop that gets in the way of the above. I don't want to be constantly re-learning how to actually get to what I want.

Now sure, I like to see some changes, but having been with Ubuntu (to follow this example) since about Karmic Koala and made iterative updates over time. I have always been cautious in my updates but each iteration has been better at fixing issues.

Notably the community of users is actually against adding bling  ... but then unlike the author what they want is functionality not "a UI as entertainment" or "user experience" (you can do twitter for that).

What happens with this sort of driver (shallow reviewers) is a thinning of depth of experience which often results in a loss of understanding of what can be done (or indeed the doing of that).

My phone (Android) is a good example of that. Reviewers made shallow and blinkered assessments of that version of software and ignored (because probably they were too naïve and shallow) the great advanced features that it came with (which took some years to find their way into Android officially).

Shallow and dim reviewers pushing stuff to an unsophisticated base of users (who should probably stay with Windows 8) result in people never actually making best use of their stuff (perhaps they aren't able to anyway if my support calls are any indication)

Ultimately my view on a good design is not to continually add more, but the view of when there is essentially nothing left to take away while leaving it functional. Updates should be based on user requirements changing. An example of this is that I once wrote a small bit of software that queried the HR system (on the Oracle server side) and returned names, office location, phone and email. I subsequently left the organisation (to do more advanced things elsewhere) and came back 10 years later to find that the modern iteration of that was just using my original software and wrapping it in a nice HTML presentation layer. Nice pat on my back there.

Ubuntu is pretty much there right now in terms of functionality.

So my next submission is about a phone of mine, I bought it soon after it was released even though I expected the reviews were wrong. I bought it mainly because it had VoLTE capability and as I was entirely "hot-spotting" here at home for my internet needs (laptop, tablet ...) it turned out that 1) VoLTE wasn't effective in my area and 2) the WiFi Hotspot was pretty inferior to my exsting phones exemplary implementation.

However one thing that's ball-tearingly clear in what was wrong with the reviews was Image Stabilisation in video ... this phone rocks!

and yet the brain dead lazy (clearly copy paste each others works) reviewers all said it didn't have stabilisation.

The only way they could have missed this is to not actually try any hand held video and then look at the results.

So sadly ... reviewers are the problem (them an spec sheet gazers)